I usually spend some evenings in the quiet days between Christmas and new year to clean up my personal information stuff and this year is no exception. After many years of increasing amounts of emails per year, this year the number of both received and sent mail seems to have stabilized. Anyway, this year is a bit special, in that I’m slowly moving away from my own hacked/costumized solutions to Zimbra. That in itself, of course, involved quite a bit of hacking.

Previously I had my addresses in an LDAP database which I could export to LDIF format. To get that into Zimbra I converted to a CSV file acceptable to Zimbra. To figure out the format of the CSV I first exported a test calendar from Zimbra. Here is the Perl script I threw together to convert my LDIF to CSV: ldif2csv.pl.

UPDATE: it seems I could have imported my VCS file directly in Thunderbird/Ligthning with this add-on.

Also previously, I had my calendar in my own customized WebCalender, running under mod_perl on my own server. To get this into Zimbra I exported to VCS, imported in Outlook, exported from Outlook to CSV, imported in Gmail, exported from Gmail to ICS which I could finally import in Zimbra.

My Zimbra calendar and contacts are accessible (editable) from Thunderbird/Ligthning via CALDAV and the Zindus plugin respectively. For the form of the CALDAV URLs see this blog.

I also improved my backup procedures somewhat using the incremental backup feature of rsync, following blog.interlinked.org/tutorials/rsync_time_machine.html. Here is the small BASH script I use: backup.sh.