Address Book Incompatible

My first tiptoes into open testing began this weekend when I brought home a used desktop PC and began setting it up. It came with Windows XP pre-installed so I didn't have to deal with setting up the OS, but everything else I'm doing myself.

My goal is to have all the software on the box other than Windows and the occasional game to be free and open source. I considered installing Ubuntu but since this box will be doing double duty as a family PC, I decided against that.

One of the first applications I installed was Mozilla Thunderbird, the email client. I gave up using email clients several years ago and have been using webmail clients since then because of incompatibility issues, especially for address books. Migrating from one email client to another was always a major hassle. I was curious how Thunderbird would approach this issue.

Setting up Thunderbird to access my GMail account was straightforward. Importing my address book into Thunderbird was another matter.

Thunderbird appears to support importing from a variety of email address formats, including LDIF. Unfortunately, my old address book was stored in Palm Desktop 4.0.1, which only supports exporting to CSV or text files and a custom (and therefore useless) format called Address Archive.

I exported to CSV format, but since the data was not self-describing, I had to work with Thunderbird's import wizard to tell it which data belonged to which fields. After a lot of work, I got close, but it was clear that much of the data just wasn't going to map to the right fields. I'm going to have to do a lot of manual editing to clean it up.

I don't blame Thunderbird, the real issue is the lack of an open, universal, human-readable, self-describing format for address books and contacts. LDIF may be an open standard, but like anything based on LDAP, it isn't exactly human-readable.

There's been quite of a bit of buzz lately about the need for an open standard for applications like MySpace and Facebook relationships. But the software industry still hasn't solved the more basic problem of how to get software to describe people in a way that every other program can understand. It should be possible for any email client, address book software, or webmail to import or export entries from any other by at least one direct method. Until we can do that we shouldn't be talking about open standards for relationships.