mmaker / asynk

Flexible Bi-directional sync for Emacs BBDB, Google Contacts, and MS Outlook

Created : Wed Aug 24 22:41:42 IST 2011

This is only a short introduction and some key points of interest. For more details on how to use ASynK please refer to the included documentation, or the official website for ASynK is at: http://karra-asynk.appspot.com You will find links to latest download, complete documentaiton, and other information on that website.

About

ASynK - Awesome Sync (by Karra), is a flexible PIM synchronization platform written in Python. ASynK was earlier known as Gout. High level features include:

• ASynK allows two-way sync of Contacts across any two supported sources - Google Contacts, Microsoft Outlook, any CardDAV server and Emacs BBDB.
• ASynK is the only two-way synchronization option for BBDB known to be in existence today. So if you are keen to keep your BBDB content synchronized with a mobile device or Outlook, look no further.
• ASynK works on Windows, MacOS X, and Linux. Outlook synchronization only works on Windows.
• Synchronization is granular to the level of ‘Folders’, i.e. you can synchronize one folder of Google Contacts with a Outlook folder (on Windows at work, say), and another Google folder in the same account with BBDB (On your Mac, say)
• The infrastructure is there to add more database and item types (i.e. tasks, notes, etc.), but currently only Contacts synchronization for Google Contacts, BBDB and Outlook supported
• It is free software, and released under the GNU AGPL (Affero GPL) version 3

Installation

Dependencies

• You need Python (tested with 2.7, try earlier versions at your discretion; may not work with Python 3)
• If you wish to sync to Outlook you can do that only on Windows. Further you will need MS Outlook installed, along with a third party python library called Pywin32 from Mark Hammond
• On Debian (and likely Ubuntu) you will need the following packages: sudo apt-get install python-argparse
• The dateutil package available from http://labix.org/python-dateutil or https://pypi.python.org/pypi/python-dateutil

Building Documentation

There is no build or installation required to use the main program. You can go the section on Usage in the documentation

If you wish to build the documentation from source, you can try one of the following:

• $ cd doc
• $ make pdf
• $ make # Builds all the targets
• $ make clean
• $ make distclean

The supported doc types are: ‘pdf’, ‘html’, ‘info’, ‘docbook’, and ‘text’

You may have to install additional programs like makeinfo, texi2html etc. See the “Dependencies” section in the documentation

Usage

The recommended way to use ASynK is to first create your own ‘sync profile’ which specifies which folders and PIM DBs you want to keep in sync. Refer to the documentation for more details.

For the really impatient, ASynK comes with two default sync profiles that kick in if no other profile is configured.

$ python asynk.py –op=sync [–dry-run] [–log=debug]

If you run the above command on Windows, the entire default outlook contacts folder will get synched to “My Contacts” on Google Contacts. (You will be prompted for your google username and password).

On any non-windows platform your ~/.bbdb will be synced to google.

For further usage help, try “python asynk.py -h”