A FRITZ!Box Fon WLAN 7270 has a built-in telephone directory which is maintained via a Web interface, from which I can create, edit, remove and backup telephone directory entries used by attached DECT phones. That is all fine and dandy, but I want to be able to populate that directory from existing an existing database, and I don’t want to fumble with import stuff from the Web interface. It turns out that is easier said than done, and it took a while to find out how to do that. I finally managed, thanks to work done by Christoph Linder on a Thunderbird add-on called Thunder!Box.

Thunder!Box allows transferring contacts from your Thunderbird-Addressbook to the phonebook of a connected AVM FRITZ!Box FON router and back. You may also use your address book to initiate calls.

A Fritz!Box has a very special authentication handshake, which makes the implementation rather secure, but tricky to access. (AVM have published a technical note on this, in German.) Anyways, to cut a long story short, I’ve implemented what I call fritzuploader – a small command-line tool which uploads an XML file containing a telephone directory to overwrite that in the Fritz!Box’ flash. I’ve been using this quite a bit and haven’t experienced any problems with it, but note it might quite well fry your Fritz!Box. Further note, that you should probably use this a bit sparingly, as the number of writes to flash memory is finite. The Github repository for fritzuploader contains a sample phonebook.csv you can use as a starting point, the tiny csv2xml converter to create the phonebook.xml file which is then finally uploaded to the Fritz!Box with fritzuploader. At this point the current telephone directory on the Fritz!Box is overwritten, so you’ll want to back that up first via the Web interface. The resulting import looks like this: I’d be interested to hear if you are successful with other AVM Fritz!Box models.