2015/01/13

Thunderbird syncs with Gmail Contact

Thunderbird syncs with Gmail Contact

Thunderbird is one of the popular e-mail clients on the market. As the demand for collaboration arises, Thunderbird plug-in developers have written plug-ins for both contact (address book) and calendar that can be associated with a variety of contact and calendar services such as Gmail.

Associating Thunderbird with Google Contact is feasible but it requires lots of steps. You can follow steps below to do it:

  1. Install Thunderbird’s newest build from Mozilla website.
  2. Open Thunderbird and open Tools --> Add-ons.
  3. At Add-ons Manager page’s top-right, enter google contacts and search. You will get Google Contacts 0.7.xx in the search result. Click on Install.
  4. Restart Thunderbird afterwards.Now. go to Extensions tab to the left and click on Options next to Google Contacts.i
  5. Add your Gmail account by click on Add. Then go to Experimental tab and define a time interval in Auto reload to reload if you like to sync your address book more frequently. Then click on OK to exit window.

  6. Restart Thunderbird, you will be prompted to perform OAuth 2.0. Proceed with entering password.
  7. Click on Tools --> Address Book. You will see You will see an address book: Google-username@gmail.com.

As you see, importing and synchronizing between your Gmail Contacts and Thunderbird require lots of steps. However, synchronization of contacts does not occur explicitly. You may need to watch out for any content change. Yet, restarting Thunderbird will sync trigger the sync. In case you are using Outlook, you can try EVO Collaborator for Outlook which enables you to synchronize your Gmail Contacts bi-directionally.

3 comments:

  1. THANK YOU SO MUCH DUDE!
    I have been trying to figure this out for several days until I see your tutorial, you are absolutely a life saver

    ReplyDelete
  2. FYI, this doesn't work any more since Google changed OAuth2 to not work with username/password. See https://developers.google.com/identity/protocols/AuthForInstalledApps

    You might try gContactSync instead. It seems to work with the new auth mechanism.

    ReplyDelete
  3. thanks man, I will update this document when I have time.

    ReplyDelete