Ok, I have upgraded a users Thunderbird with the Connector nightly that contains a fix for read-only Address Books, but there are still 2 issues that need to be addressed (in my opinion).

a) Users are also able to successfully add new (local) entries to an Address book that they have Read-Only access to, and

b) Users are able to successfully edit an existing Contact

With the changes to the nightly Connector build, the Sync attempts for all changes to one of these Address Books now correctly show as failed, which is definitely better than the previous notification saying they succeeded, but...

The ideal behavior should be to simply not allow the Contact to be added.

Since SOGo is able to prevent deleting a contact in one of these Address Books, why can it not simply prevent adding one - give the same exact error that the user gets when they try to delete one:

"One or more elements of this addressbook could not be [erased][modified]. You may not have the required rights to achieve this operation."

This eliminates any/all confusion for the user, as well as the attendant support issues this causes.

If there is a good reason that this can not or should not be done, then at a minimum, I think the warning/notification for a) should be much more prominent - ie, an actual pop-up dialog that requires acknowledgement/action by the user (possibly with a 'Don't show this again' checkbox that is unchecked by default), that gives a more detailed error message, so the user understands what is going on, and can actually fix it - e.g.:

"You have added a new Contact $ContactName to the Read-Only $AddressBookName Address Book. Your local copy of this Contact has been saved, but it can not be sync'd to the Server Address Book. Please move the Contact to your Personal Address Book (or another Address Book that you have Write privileges for) to resolve this problem."

The second issue (b) above is more serious and is already causing support issues for me, and I believe should be addressed differently.

I believe that these changes should either be over-written at the next Sync, with a pop-up notification informing the user that they attempted to modify a Contact in an Address Book they don't have write access to.