Before we get started, one rather obvious question is, why use a desktop email client at all? After all, if you are using Gmail as your central mailbox, you could just as easily access Gmail from a web browser on your desktop - synchronization problem solved! That’s a legitimate point. Scott MacGregor, Thunderbird’s lead engineer, makes a good case for preferring desktop email clients over webmail. All I can say is that, while I love Gmail, desktop email clients just seem to feel better.

Using Thunderbird

I am going to cover using Thunderbird, Mozilla’s cross-platform e-mail application. It is based on the same technology as their Firefox browser. It has great filtering and junk mail features as well as the ability to be customized via add-ons.

The first thing you need to do is enable IMAP on your Gmail or Google Apps for your Domain (GAFYD) email account. You then need to do a basic setup in Thunderbird for fetching Gmail via IMAP. This is covered in another Google tutorial. The key is not to use the Gmail option when setting up the account in Thunderbird:

The basic setup, and also some commentary on using a desktop client vs. the web interface for Gmail is covered in the following video:

So far so good. At this point, we are successfully using Thunderbird, a desktop email client, to access our Gmail. Most importantly, our desktop and web based Gmail are completely synchronized - if you make a change in Gmail via the web based interface, it will be reflected in your desktop email client, and vice versa.

Thunderbird Tweaks

You could stop here, but that would be too easy! By default Thunderbird uses its own folders for handling sent mail, drafts and trash. We want Thunderbird to store these emails in the same place as the web based Gmail. We also want items identified as junk by Thunderbird to be tagged as spam in Gmail. All of this is addressed here in Lifehacker’s Turn Thunderbird into the Ultimate Gmail IMAP Client article.

If you also use Gmail as a central mailbox for sending email from multiple email accounts (like me), you will need to add these other email addresses to your Gmail account in Thunderbird by using the Manage Identities feature. When composing an email, you can then select from which address the message will be sent (technically it is sent from Gmail, but the reply-to address will be the one you picked). One nice feature in Thunderbird that is not available in the web based Gmail is the ability to have different signatures for each identity - one more reason you might prefer desktop to web based access.

A lot of people might now stop here. After all, Thunderbird and your web based Gmail are perfectly synched. However, in Thunderbird, if you go to write a new email, there is no auto-complete of all the email addresses you used in the web based interface. The problem is that your Gmail contacts are not accessible from Thunderbird (yet!).

Contacts

This is a tough one. One thing you can do is export your Gmail contacts to a file and import these into your Thunderbird address book. However, this is a completely manual process. For example, if you add new addresses into your Gmail contacts you will need to re-import them into Thunderbird.

One elegant solution is to use GCALDaemon to access your Google contacts from Thunderbird. Notice that I did not say synchronize. If you go with this method, you have probably made a decision to keep your master list of contacts on the web. This is a decision I made because, I want my contacts available to me everywhere, especially when I am away from my desktop. For lack of a better solution, and mostly because of my use of Gmail as a central mailbox, I use my Gmail contacts as my main contact repository.

Thunderbird can access network based contacts via LDAP. Unfortunately Gmail by itself does not provide LDAP access, but GCALDaemon allows you to run an LDAP server locally that can access your Google contacts. Thunderbird can connect to this local LDAP source to get at your Google contacts. How to do this is covered in a GCALDaemon usage guide (assuming you have in fact downloaded and installed GCALDaemon!). Note that steps 1-3 can be skipped, and instead of modifying text based configuration files, you can set everything up in the more user friendly graphical GCALDaemon Config Editor (which can be accessed from your Windows Start menu):

In this window, select the LDAP server tab on the left. Click on the Enable LDAP server and Gmail contact importer label to ensure LDAP will be enabled. Select your Gmail  account. You can press the Account button to add a new Gmail account (it is very simple). Now go back to step 4 in the usage guide to complete the setup in Thunderbird. One last thing, you actually have to start the GCALDaemon server. This is done from the command line (I know - very unfriendly!):

It seems like a lot, but until Gmail provides access to contacts (for example, a nice Thunderbird Add-on would be cool), this is actually a pretty workable solution. Once it is set up, you don’t have to do anything.

Managing Contacts

On a related topic, I am wondering what others are doing to manage their contacts. For me, I want to have access from both my desktop and from the web to a single contact list. I am not so sure GMail contacts is the best contact manager (in fact, it seems very under-featured). I am also having an issue with trying to seamlessly synchronize my CardScan contacts with my master Gmail contact list (for now I am doing regular imports into my Gmail contacts from CardScan, although CardScan does synchronize with their free web-based CardScan@Your Service contact manager application). How about Plaxo - anyone using that? It seems you can synch between Plaxo and Thunderbird, but I don’t think you can access your Plaxo address book from Gmail.

ShareThis