binaer-infusion

Keeping contact data on a mobile phone and the personal e-mail client in sync can be a tedious task especially if multiple e-mail client instances are involved. In this article I’m going to show how the scenario with one of Sony Ericsson’s mobile phones and two instances of Thunderbird can be handled.

On the web there exists a bunch of synchronization services that provide the possibility to sync your contact, calendar, sms, and other data among multiple mobile phones using the SyncML protocol. Together with fitting plug-ins they can also be used to sync between mobile phone and e-mail client. The services tested by me are Mobical and ZYB which both have their advantages and drawbacks.

• Mobical has a more tidy and user-friendly web interface. It is the #1 choice if you plan to edit your contacts on-line. But Mobical has relative slow syncML servers which caused some problems with my SE w880i mobile so I had to apply a little trick to get it to work correctly.
• ZYB caused no problems with my mobile but the flash web application has tiny widgets that are very hard to work with. Syncing contacts with my mobile and one instance of Thunderbird worked very well and fast, but when I added another Thunderbird instance I got all contacts duplicated from time to time which was mess because there is no easy way to find out which are the correct ones.

The basic setup

To start synchronization only a few easy steps are required:

1. Create an account with Mobical
2. Have Mobical send automatic configuration to the mobile phone. (Worked correctly with Sony Ericsson w880i)
3. Download and install the TSync Thunderbird add-on. The TSync configuration must be adjusted to use your Mobical user-name and password the database name “con” and the server URL “http://www.mobical.net/sync/server”

These three steps are sufficient to start synchronization

Tricks to apply

Unfortunately as mentioned before it is required to take care about some deficits when using certain combinations of SyncML clients and servers.

• When synchronizing with Mobical and TSync there are two noticeable problems that can be easily solved: Occasionally Thunderbird will display a dialog box about a unresponsive script and asks how to proceed. In this case the option “Continue” has to be selected. In addition the progress dialog of TSync will never close by itself. It will stay open on “Receiving data from server 6/6″ and can be safely closed using the close button of the dialog window. As seen in the sync servers log file the synchronization has finished successfully.
• When synchronizing with Mobical and a Sony Ericsson mobile there can be unexpected aborts of the synchronization process. This happens because of the Mobical server being very slow when many contacts have to be synchronized at once. There is a solution to this problem for the initial synchronization when all contacts to be synchronized are already stored on the Mobical server: First all contacts have to be deleted from the mobile. After logging in to the Mobical web site all contacts on the server should be moved to the Trashcan by deleting them. Now synchronization works fine if repeatedly about 20 contacts are undeleted in Mobical and a synchronization process is carried out with the mobile phone until all contacts have been undeleted and synchronized. From now on it is crucial to occasionally synchronize the mobile phone to prevent the synchronization process to abort when to many contacts have been added or changed at once.

Add another instance of Thunderbird

To avoid problems when synchronizing with multiple instances of Thunderbird it is important for the SyncML server to be able to differentiate between the instances. This done by the device id sent by the client to the server during each synchronization process. If you install TSync on two different Thunderbird instances they will both use the same device id which will cause problems during synchronization. Now I present step by step instructions how to change the device id of a TSync installation:

1. Locate the TSync add-on in the Thunderbird profile by looking for a file called tsync.jar.
2. Extract tsync.jar using your favourite zip file extractor in the same folder.
3. Delete tsync.jar
4. Open the file content/tsync/tsync.js using a text file editor.
5. Locate the line starting with “var devid” and change the string literal assigned to this variable.
6. Optionally also change the text that will appear in Mobical’s sync history by looking for the text “Tobias SyncML client for Thunderbird” in the same file and changing it to something identifying to which Tunderbird instance it refers.
7. Close and save tsync.js.
8. Recompress the once extracted folders and files to a file called tsync.jar using a zip file compressor.
9. Remove the extracted files and directories.
10. Restart Thunderbird if it was running.

After completing these steps synchronizing contacts with two Thunderbird instances can be really enjoyed.