How in the Tech

Syncing Your Contacts from Gmail to Thunderbird

By Adam Myers ⋅ December 1, 2008 ⋅ Tags: Gmail, Mozilla Thunderbird

At the office I’m forced to use Outlook as my main communication and scheduling tool. Outlook gets a lot of bad raps and while at one time I’m sure most of it was justified, nowadays it really isn’t that bad of a product – at least Outlook 2007. However, that doesn’t mean I use it outside of my main profession. Technically, I’m a Gmail user. Having your entire email spool in the cloud, accessible from anywhere, is a huge win for me. Obviously webmail existed long before Google got in the game but it was their unobtrusive interface and quick searching that converted. Still, there is something to be said for your traditional desktop email client. While I try a lot of new products and technology, I’m a very slow converted and suffer from attachment issues with the tried and true, irregardless of whether newer is in fact better. Because of this, I have my main Thunderbird install configure to pull mail from Gmail. It works for me, but that isn’t the summary for this article.

I am also an iPhone user, though just recently. Much to my chagrin, iTunes does not sync your iPhone contacts to and from Thunderbird – where all my contact information is stored throughout the years. A quick Google uncovered a few ways of linking the two, but I have to admit it all seemed a bit click and pray and not something I’d like to rely on. Knowing that iTunes can pull contact information from Gmail and coupled with the fact that I do use Gmail, even indirectly, I set out to use Gmail as my exclusive contacts database. Exporting and importing the addressbook is straightforward and perhaps a topic for a later date. That being said, I wasn’t particularly warm to the idea of managing my contacts with just the iPhone or in Gmail – I still wanted the flexibility of Thunderbird.

Today I found Zindus, a free Thunderbird extension that allows you to manage your Gmail contacts from within Thunderbird. Installation and configure is simple.

1. Download the extension and save it locally.
2. From within Thunderbird click on Tools->Add-ons.
3. Click Install and point it to the Zindus extension you just downloaded.



4. Still in Thunderbird, provide your Gmail credentials to the add-on from Tools->Zindus.



5. Click Sync Now.