Can RSS support in Thunderbird be extended to allow for address book subscriptions?
Use Case
I have a website for a small community, and want to provide a read-only contact list. The only solution at the moment is CardDAV. But CardDAV is rather difficult to implement, which probably explains why there’s not a lot of off-the-shelf solutions.
Consider the community website that I mentioned. It uses Drupal, which supports RSS out of the box. With plugins or minimal configuration, it can produce XML or JSON, too. But not CardDAV. The same is true of static site generators. For example, 11ty has plugins to produce RSS, and it’s trivial to produce JSON with that or any SSG. CardDAV? Not so much.
Similar Feature Requests
It’s not just me. There is a documented need for read-only contacts, as you can see in these posts:
- Read-only contact group
- Read-Only CardDAV/LDAP server
- Read-Only Contact Sharing via CardDav/Contact Payload
- Addressbook sharing as read-only
As far as I can see, the most complicated parts of CardDAV are the write parts. The thing is, I don’t need – or even want – full syncing via WebDAV. Neither do the authors of these posts. We want simple, read-only addressbooks.
A feed of contacts that Thunderbird could subscribe to, the same way it subscribes to RSS feeds, would solve our use cases.