Address Book
In the address book, accessible through Shift-Ctrl-A,
the Addressbook button, or through the "Tools" menu, you
store e-mail addresses of the people and places you want
to write more often.
If the options have been compiled into Sylpheed, the
address book can connect to a LDAP server for address
lookup, and you can use the address book stored on your
Palm PDA.
Adding and Deleting Addresses
Adding an address to the address book is quite easy too.
Rightclick the folder or group you want to add the address
to, select "new address" and fill in the dialog that comes
up. You can also directly click the Add button in the
address book window, and the dialog comes up. In this
case the address is moved into the folder/group that is
selected at the moment of adding.
In the "Basic data" tab, you can fill the first
and last name and provide a nickname. The "Display name"
will be used by the "Name" column of the address book
window.
In the "E-Mail address" tab, fill the address field
and use the "Add" button to add the address to the list.
An alias can also be assigned to this address and used
when searching for an address.
Several addresses can be assigned to the same person
in your address book by repeating the sequence described
above. The addresses can then be sorted by using the
"Move up" and "Move down" buttons. The address on the top
will be the first one listed in the address book main window.
Deleting an address is equally simple. Find the address,
click it once, and press the Delete button.
Folders and Groups
You can use groups and folders to organize your address
book into categories, hierarchies and aliases.
The folders are used to generate a hierarchical organization
and contain the actual addresses, while the groups are
used to group together addresses that lives in separate
folders.
Sounds complicated, so let's see an example: consider
your workmates, they are arnaud (arnaud@company.com),
sandra (sandra@company.com), xavier (xavier@company.com)
and the chief, helene (helene@company.com). You can
create a folder named myGroup, create the entries
for all your workmates in this folder. Now you can create one
groupe named jokes that includes all but the boss
to use when sending your daily jokes, another one named
team that includes everybody for the usual group
(serious) communication, and a third group named
reports that includes the boss, and the one working
with you on some projects for the weekly reports.
To generate this kind of addresses organization
you only need to create the entries once, then when
creating groups you can select among the existing entries
to fill the groups.
The address book, like the mail folders, can be expanded
into an entire tree of sections. For this you right-click
on the folder where you want to add a new folder, and
select "new folder". Then you can enter a descriptive
name for the folder, click Ok, and your folder is created.
In this same way you can create a new group in a folder.
Right-click on the folder, select "new group", enter a name
for it, and that's it.
The group settings window pops up in order to fill the group
with addresses. Use the two arrows to add to or remove from
the group the selected address.
Once the group contains the list of addresses you want it to
contain, click the "OK" button to close the window.
Combination with Message Composition Window
You can either enter the first letters of an address
(or alias) in the To: or Cc: field
of the composition window and press the TAB key to
let Sylpheed do the completion or open the address book,
select addresses from there and use the To:
and Cc: buttons to copy the selected addresses
into the corresponding fields of the composition window.
When using the completion mode, when one or more address
matches the start you have entered, a dropdown list appears.
Select the correct address from this list and press enter
to complete the composition window's field.
In completion mode, the search is made on the E-mail
address and on the alias. The other fields of the
address book entry are not used (name, nickname,...).
When the address book is opened, if you select a group,
using the To: or Cc: buttons will
copy all the addresses of the selected group into the
corresponding field of the composition window.
Using our previous example, you can select the jokes
group when sending you morning jokes, and the reports
one when sending your weekly reports...
Using your PDA addressbook (with Jpilot)
Sylpheed can optionally use your PDA addressbook. This option is
available if you have compiled Sylpheed with the support of Jpilot.
For more details regarding the compilation of Sylpheed with (or without)
optional features, see the compilation section.
Sylpheed uses the Jpilot side copy of your address book, so you do
not need to put your PDA on the craddle to find an address (but do
not forget to synchronize).
In order to use your PDA's addressbook in Sylpheed, open the addressbook
window, select the JPilot icon in the left tree view,
use the File -> New Jpilot menu entry and choose a name for
this addressbook.
Define the name of the Jpilot addressbook file (usually in:
~/.jpilot/AddressDB.pdb) and press OK.
You can use one (or more) of the custom fields to store alternate
Email addresses for the same person.
Now you can browse your PDA addressbook. Sylpheed only has read
access to this addressbook, so you can't modify your PDA addressbook
from Sylpheed.
LDAP server connection
Contributed by Tom Hollins.
In order to add an LDAP server to the sylpheed program, you will click
on the Tools menu item, then click on Address book.
Sylpheed will open the address book window.
Select (click once) the LDAP Server line located in the left window
pane of the address book.
Now Click on the File menu item.
Click on the New server menu item.
Sylpheed opens a dialog box with standard LDAP text entry boxes.
We'll assume you work for Spacely Sprockets Corporation. This will be
used in the examples below.
The NAME line is the name you want to give to the LDAP server. It can
be anything but you should select, roughly the one that helps you to
identify it quickly. If you are doing this at a company, just enter
"Spacely LDAP" without the quotation marks.
The HOSTNAME line is the human name of the server from the DNS lookup
entry, OR the IP address of the LDAP server (important if the LDAP
server is used for authentication). So your company may have a server
called ldap.spacely.com. Your company may use something like 10.0.0.200.
Either of these should work.
NOTE: if you are a home user, you can specify "localhost" (no quotes)
or 127.0.0.1 as your hostname if your LDAP server runs on the same
machine as your mail client. Sylpheed automatically assumes a local
configuration and does this for you. I include this in case your
configuration is changing back to a local.
The PORT entry shouldn't have to be modified unless your IT department
has changed this. The normal port for LDAP is 389.
The SEARCH BASE text entry need not concern you since you can click
the Check Server button on this dialog box. After clicking this
button the SEARCH BASE will be automatically filled in.
The following paragraph gets technical and can be skipped for the
faint of heart.
For the sake of clarity, this is the DN (distinguished name) of the
LDAP server with only the DC entries. So for our example the LDAP
server has been setup with a DN = dc=spacely, dc=com. We would type
into the SEARCH BASE line (without quotes) "dc=spacely, dc=com".
I hope this is clear for the technically minded.
If your LDAP server allows anonymous binding and you do not have "virtual"
LDAP domains then you should be able to click on the OK button.
Now click once on the entry for your server so that it becomes highlighted.
Click once in the NAME text entry field below the right pane.
Enter someone's first name.
Click once on the Lookup button. It should work. Below the lookup
button is a status line which will tell you whether you have an error
or not. Also, while it is searching it will blink (a good sign because
this means the login to the server worked).
If it does work you can skip the rest of this discussion.
If your LDAP server does not allow anonymous binding then you will
need to look at the top of the dialog box and find the "tab" marked
Extended and click it once.
You may need to enter the top level DN because you may have an LDAP
server which is setup with multiple virtual domains. Your IT guy
needs to get involved here by telling you what the DN really is
along with, maybe, its password. It really depends upon how it is
setup. Maybe the DN includes a CN (common name).
So for our example (and in the OpenLDAP examples) you have entered
a DN = cn=manager, dc=spacely, dc=com.
In the BIND DN text entry box enter (without quotes)
"cn=manager, dc=spacely, dc=com".
In the PASSWORD text entry box enter just the password itself no
equals sign or anything.
Click the OK and try the test lookup above.
If you are still experiencing a problem, then it may be the
search criteria you are using or the attributes used by your
LDAP server.
The attributes" of the server are "field names" that are being
searched. The acceptable fields are automatically entered for
the Sylpheed defaults, and they are (&(mail=*)(cn=%s*)). I will
use words to now describe that line, just in case it is hard for
you to figure out what is entered here: left open parenthesis,
ampersand, left open parenthesis, the word mail (or any attribute
in LDAP speak or called field in database speak), an equal sign,
an asterisk (means search all), right closing parenthesis, left
open parenthesis, the letters "cn", an equal sign,a percent sign,
the letter "s", an asterisk, right closing parenthesis, right
closing parenthesis.
While not necessarily the best criteria it should work, but only
if your IT department has formatted the Common Name (CN) the way
you are searching for it.
The entry essentially states "search on ALL email addresses, and
the common name starts with" (whatever you have typed into the
lookup field).
Another way to test this is to work through the alphabet and enter
one character only, and see if this retrieves some entries. Once
you see some entries you will understand how to effectively search.
If this doesn't work then you will need to get someone from your
IT department involved. The "mail" or "cn" either isn't used in a
normal way, doesn't exist, or it is stored some way that can not
be debugged in a document like this one.
Additional searching for people who get some results but not exactly
what they want:
Try using and asterisk before your search criteria. This will say
to the LDAP server "I want you to return all entries where this
text exists anywhere in the CN field".
By now you should realize that if you are entering this asterisk
all the time then you right click your LDAP server entry in the
left pane and choose Edit from the pop-up menu. Click on the
Extended tab and change that first line to have an asterisk
before the percent sign. I use this since I don't always know
whether the name was entered as a formal name like Thomas or
informal like Tom.
If you still can't do anything with LDAP then there is a proxy
between you and the LDAP server that your IT department has to
address, or there is something about the "attributes" (fields)
of your LDAP database you will need to enter into that extended
tab of the LDAP server edit dialog box.