[Evolution] webdav contacts and Zimbra

["John A. Sullivan III" <jsullivan opensourcedevel com>]

Hello, all.  We are having a nightmare of a time trying to integrate
Zimbra and any Linux based PIM front end.  Both Evolution and Kontact
(from KDE 3.5 as we are using Debian Lenny) are seriously broken when it
comes to interoperating with Zimbra.

IMAP and CalDAV are working very well in Evolution but Contacts have
become a showstopper on what could be a very large Evolution deployment
as email without contacts is . . . well . . . useless.

The first issue is that we are able to connect via webdav to Zimbra and
download the series of .vcf files but Evolution does not seem to
recognize them.  No contacts appear and there are no search results.  I
am guessing the problem is that the webdav plugin is expecting mime-type
text/x-vcard but Zimbra returns text/vcard.  Apparently x-vcard has been
deprecated in favor of vcard.  Is there any way to get the webdav plugin
to access vcard instead?

The second problem is the impracticality of downloading the entire
contact list every time one wishes to make a query against the contact
list.  We are looking at thousands of contacts.  I'm guessing we are
stuck with that as it is the nature of WebDAV from what I understand.
Is there any other way? I'd love to use LDAP but that presents other
issues more on the Zimbra side.

Any help would be greatly appreciated.  We've lost weeks on this and
risk putting a potentially multi-thousand node deployment at risk if we
do not solve it.  Thanks - John