Hi All,
I just got an AU 3012 CA. Rather than sprain my
thumb, I'm inspired to consolidate all my addresses
books online and then sync to my keitai. Can anyone
suggest software and standards?
Objectives:
1. online so I can access it from anywhere.
2. local export file for backup.
3. sync (dump) to AU 3012 CA every 3 months or so.
4. upload a new contact from keitai every week or so.
5. contains multiple addresses (email & physical) and
phone numbers per entry.
6. access addresses online from home email agent (or
automatic sync).
7. access addresses online from Yahoo mail (or some
other web site that will collect email from other POP
mailboxes).
8. print the whole book in business-card sized pages.
9. support Japanese characters.
10. preferably Linux-based software (not Windows).
I haven't tried any commercial Japanese PIM keitai
software yet, mainly because it's Windows based. I'd
like to find out more about LDAP, but I can't run a
server myself because I don't have a global IP
address. Is there a public one, and would LDAP be
appropriate? What clients?
My investigation on the AU 3012 CA front so far
reveals that I don't really need any commercial
software or hardware for syncing manually. I can save
addresses to the data folder in VCARD 3.0 format and
email them to myself (but only individually) as .vcf
attachments. Likewise I can download a whole book of
addresses in one .vcf attachment. I've found the
VCARD site and RFCs, and it looks like a viable
format. I haven't even looked for any Java or serial
cable possibilities yet.
I'm thinking of using my Yahoo mail address book. The
English Yahoo can export addresses in LDIF (related to
LDAP), but the LDIF to VCARD perl utility I found
produces an incompatible VCARD format. I can fix it,
but another problem is that the Japanese Yahoo only
exports in CSV format, and I suspect the English Yahoo
won't handle Japanese characters properly.
So, I can make a Yahoo CSV to VCARD converter, but I
suspect that the most appropriate language for this
would be perl, and I don't really know perl. I'm
afraid awk will be fooled by commas inside quotes,
won't strip the quotes, won't handle blank fields,
etc.
Also, I'll still need a way to get the email addresses
to my mail client at home. I've been using pine, but
my mail servers aren't running IMAP anymore, and with
ADSL now I might as well POP all the spam and
attachments down anyway. I still can't access IMAP
from work over the firewall (thus Yahoo), so I'm open
to other clients. Mozilla could use LDAP? But GUIs
are a little tedious to navigate. Should I check out
emacs? (all roads lead to emacs...) Whatever the
mail client, it's got to run on Linux and support
Japanese.
As much as possible, I'd like to avoid using seperate
copies of my address book, as they tend to get out of
sync and out of date and degenerate to the mess I'm in
now. But I still want to access it from as many
platforms as possible. After the address book, the
calendar is next. I'd consider an ezweb pay-per-month
PIM site as well, if there's one that can do all this.
You are all using email now, so somebody must have
some good ideas. Yoroshiku!
11011011
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Received on Mon Jul 1 05:43:36 2002