Can Thunderbird’s RSS support be extended to enable 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 also produce JSON or XML, but not CardDAV. The same is true of static site generators. For example, 11ty has a plugin to produce RSS, and it’s dead simple to make it emit JSON or XML. CardDAV? Not so simple.
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 case.