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This article describes how to configure a shared address book in the Roundcube webmail client. With a shared (global) address book, you can share contacts across multiple e-mail accounts. For example, you can create a user@example.com entry in the shared address book, and all of your e-mail users will be able to view and use the contact from their own accounts.

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Configuring a shared address book

To configure a shared address book in Roundcube, follow these steps:
  1. Install your own instance of the Roundcube webmail client. You can do this manually, or you can use Softaculous.
    📘 Note For information about how to install Roundcube using Softaculous, please see this article.
  2. Enable the PHP ldap extension. To do this, follow these steps:
  • Log in to cPanel.
    📘 Note If you do not know how to log in to your cPanel account, please see this article.
  • In the SOFTWARE section of the cPanel home screen, click Select PHP Version:
    cPanel - Software - Select PHP Version icon
  • On the PHP Selector page, under PHP Extensions, select the check box next to ldap:
    cPanel - PHP Selector - Extensions - ldap
  1. Log in to your account using SSH.
  2. At the command line, change to the directory where you installed Roundcube in step 1. For example, type cd ~/public_html/roundcube.
  3. To install the shared address book plugin, type the following command:
  1. Using your preferred text editor, open the plugin configuration file at plugins/globaladdressbook/config.inc.php.
  2. Configure the options for the plugin:
  • name: This is the name of the shared address book that appears in users’ contact lists. By default, the name is Shared Contacts.
  • perms: By default, the shared address book is read-only, and only admin users can add, edit, and delete contacts. If you want regular users to be able to add, edit, or delete contacts, change this setting.
  • groups: If you want to enable groups in the shared address book, change this setting to true.
  • admin: This setting specifies the admin user for the shared address book. For example, to enable the admin@example.com account as an admin user, use the following setting:
  • autocomplete: If you want addresses from the shared address book to appear automatically when addressing a message, change this setting to true.
  • visibility: By default, the shared address book is visible to all users. If you want to restrict visibility to a specific set of users, change this setting.
For details about all of these options and additional options available for the plugin, please visit https://github.com/johndoh/roundcube-globaladdressbook.
  1. Log in to Roundcube with a valid e-mail account, and then in the left sidebar, click Contacts. The Shared Contacts entry appears (or the name you specified if you changed the name setting in the configuration file):
    Roundcube - Shared contacts
From here, you can manage the contacts in the shared address book.

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More information

For more information about Roundcube, please visit https://roundcube.net.