Saturday, September 19, 2009

Using Thunderbird within NUS / Setting up LDAP

One of the difficult-to-use functionalities of Thunderbird (popular with Linux/Ubuntu users) seems to be the LDAP address book. The reasons for this unfriendliness may be diverse (one of them usually is MS likes to define its own standards). I tried setting up the LDAP using several combinations like the below copied from NUS Computer Center site:
  • Choose Add Dir.
  • For ldap-server, enter ldapstf.nus.edu.sg (for staff address book) or ldapstu.nus.edu.sg (for student address book)
  • For search-base, enter DC=stf,DC=nus,DC=edu,Dc=sg (for staff address book) or DC=stf,DC=nus,DC=edu,Dc=sg (for student address book) Set use-implicitly-from-compose and Pine will lookup names you type in the To: line while composing messages in the directory. If there are multiple names that match you will be prompted to select from a list of matching entries.
Believe me I tried a lot of different combinations but I could not succeed (at the time of writing). Finally the following getaround satisfactorily worked for me:

I had setup thunderbird with IMAP. I installed the add-on "Email Address Crawler" https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/thunderbird/addon/9995 which crawls all mails and reads addresses into the address book. Then I ran the crawler on my Inbox and Sent Mail. This was enough for all the email addresses I usually use.

I also checked the option: "Preferences > Composition > Addressing >  Automatically Add Outgoing Email Addresses to My: ".

4 comments:

TheEspian said...

According to this post ( http://forums.msexchange.org/fb.aspx?m=30659114 ) in the MS Exchange forums, you have to add domain\username in the "Bind DN" field. After that it works!

Unknown said...

@quirK By "it" I infer you're refering to LDAP address book. I vaguely recall having tried the option you say too. Have you made it to work on a Thunderbird?

TheEspian said...

Yes, on Thunderbird 3.0 beta. I wanted to search both staff and students, so I used the address "ldap.nus.edu.sg".

I used "dc=nus,dc=edu,dc=sg" in "Base DN" and "NUSSTU\myuserID" in "Bind DN".

I used "(objectClass=user)(mail=*)" as the search filter in the Advanced tab. However, I think using the entire directory strains the system. I don't know how to set Thunderbird to use multiple sub-directories.

Alex said...
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