This document is intended to "fill in the gaps" about how Enterprise customers can leverage and customize LDAP support in Mozilla Thunderbird. It is not intended as an introduction to LDAP and Mozilla products. It assumes you are already familiar with configuring preferences for deployed builds in addition to setting up Thunderbird to use an LDAP directory. It should be noted that all of this information applies to both Thunderbird and the Seamonkey application suite.

Mail Compose Typedown

In mail compose, when typing a partial mail address, a typedown window appears listing possible matches against address books and LDAP directories. For large companies, there may be a large number of users in the directory with the same name. In such a scenario, it may be hard to tell which person you really want to send the message to. In Thunderbird, the type down window can be customized to show arbitrary LDAP fields. This can be accomplished by setting the following preferences:

	    user_pref("mail.autoComplete.commentColumn", 2);
	    user_pref("ldap_2.servers.DIRECTORYNAME.autoComplete.commentFormat", "[ou]");
	  

The first preference tells us to use a comment column in the type down (the default value is 0 for no comment), and that the value for the comment is a custom string unique to each directory. The commentFormat preference is set on EACH directory. It acts as a template, specifying the extra LDAP attribute which should be used in the comment field along with how the attribute should be formatted. It expects the following format:

• The desired LDAP attribute should be wrapped in square brackets. In this example, we are setting the organization unit as the LDAP attribute.
• You can also insert arbitrary text to clarify the LDAP attribute. i.e. "Department: [ou]" would yield a type down entry that looks like "John Smit Department: Client Engineering".

LDAP Schema

The following table summarizes the schema used by Mozilla Thunderbird to map between LDAP attributes and attributes within the the addressbook. Some notes about the relationship:

• There is a many to one relationship between ldap properties and its mozilla counterpart.
• There is a one to one relationship between a mozilla property and its ldap counterpart. If there are multiple entries for a mozilla property, the first takes precedence.

These relationships ensure: Generality is maintained when mapping from ldap properties to mozilla. Consistent round tripping when editing mozilla properties which are stored on an ldap server.

Address Book Attribute	LDAP Property
FirstName	givenname
LastName	sn
LastName	surname
DisplayName	cn
DisplayName	commonname
DisplayName	displayname
NickName	xmozillanickname
PrimaryEmail	mail
SecondEmail	xmozillasecondemail
WorkPhone	telephonenumber
HomePhone	homephone
FaxNumber	fax
FaxNumber	facsimiletelephonenumber
PagerNumber	pager
PagerNumber	pagerphone
CellularNumber	mobile
CellularNumber	cellphone
CellularNumber	carphone
WorkAddress	postofficebox
WorkAddress	streetaddress
WorkCity	l
WorkCity	locality
WorkState	st
WorkState	region
WorkZipCode	postalcode
WorkZipCode	zip
WorkCountry	countryname
JobTitle	title
Department	ou
Department	orgunit
Department	department
Department	departmentnumber
Company	o
Company	company
WorkCountry	countryname
_AimScreenName	nscpaimscreenname
WebPage1	workurl
WebPage2	homeurl
BirthYear	birthyear
Custom1	custom1
Custom2	custom2
Custom3	custom3
Custom4	custom4
Notes	notes
Notes	description
PreferMailFormat	xmozillausehtmlmail
LastModifiedDate	modifytimestamp

Custom LDAP Attributes

Add information here about how to use custom LDAP attributes for various address book properties. We don't support this yet. See Bug #119291 for more details.