Sync SmarterMail with Apple Address Book and iCal (MacOS 10.7 Lion)

This article applies to recent versions of SmarterMail Enterprise. View articles for SmarterMail 15.x and earlier.

Users can synchronize SmarterMail with iCal and Address Book on computers running MacOS Lion (10.7) using the CalDAV and CardDAV protocols. These protocols can be used to synchronize contacts, calendars and notes. NOTE: For ease of configuration on the Mac, the system administrator should setup a CalDAV and CardDAV SRV DNS record. This is what makes the Mac auto-discover settings.

CardDAV for Address Book

Follow these steps to set up syncing through CardDav:

  1. Go to System Preferences.
  2. Click Mail, Contacts & Calendars.
  3. Highlight Add Account and click Other.
  4. Select CardDav and click Create.
  5. Enter your username, password and server address in the appropriate fields.
    • The username is your full e-mail address (Ex: User@example.com).
    • The password is the corresponding password for the e-mail address.
    • For the server name, log in to webmail and navigate to Settings > Account, then copy the URL that's shown on the WebDAV card. Generally it will be your webmail login URL then /WebDAV/ (Ex: mail.example.com/WebDAV/)
  6. Click Create. Your account is now setup. You can view your contacts by opening Address Book.

NOTE: Address Book uses vCard 3.0 and will need to be switched to vCard 2.1. To do this, go to Preferences, select the vCard tab and switch to vCard 2.1.

CalDAV for iCal
Follow these steps to set up syncing through CalDAV:

  1. Go to System Preferences.
  2. Click Mail, Contacts & Calendars.
  3. Highlight Add Account and click Other.
  4. Select CalDav and click Create.
  5. Enter your username, password and server address in the appropriate fields.
    • The username is your full e-mail address (Ex: User@example.com).
    • The password is the corresponding password for the e-mail address.
    • For the server name, log in to webmail and navigate to Settings > Account, then copy the URL that's shown on the WebDAV card. Generally it will be your webmail login URL then /WebDAV/ (Ex: mail.example.com/WebDAV/)
  6. Click Create. Your account is now setup. You can view your contacts by opening iCal.
 
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Feedback

Uh, how do you setup CalDAV and CalDAV SRV dns records as it says you should? Link please!
Bruce Demske (2/7/2014 at 7:18 AM)
Bruce, this kind of depends on your DNS provider, but here is an example:

_caldav._tcp.YourMailDomain.com service = 0 0 80 mail.YourDomain.com
_carddav._tcp.YourMailDomain.com service = 0 0 80 mail.YourDomain.com

Derek Curtis (2/10/2014 at 1:03 PM)
Is it possible to link two smartermail calendars to iCal?
William Sarno (11/20/2014 at 7:38 PM)
Hi William,

I believe you can link two SmarterMail calendars from separate accounts to iCal. For example, if you have twos account, abc@exmaple.com and xyz@example.com, you would be able to sync both of those accounts' calendar to iCal. However, you wouldn't be able to sync multiple calendars from the same SmarterMail account.

Hope that helps!

Andrea Free (11/21/2014 at 9:01 AM)