Being modern means using social networks and new apps but we all seem to still have email.

I’ve been using Gmail in it’s webpage for years and years now. Before then I used Thunderbird. Many of my clients still use Thunderbird so I just reinstalled it, set it up with IMAP for my Gmail account and thought I’d go through some of the settings I did that might help other people out there.

Setting up an imap Google account

I always recommend using imap to get email from your server. This leaves the mail on the server until you view it. Gmail has an All Mail folder that includes everything you did not delete. The other option, POP mail, will pull all your mail off the server and delete it from the server. This means trying to see your mail from our phone or another computer will not work, it will have moved to the computer that POP’ed it.

IMAP mail will normally only download the message header and subject until you choose to view it. I am using Thunderbird as a backup for my mail so I have IMAP pull the whole message. For me this means my message file on my computer is almost 1.5 Gig, and that is compressed. But if my account was grunged at Google somehow I still have copies of everything on this machine. I then backup my data folder. This way I could open a new computer, install a new copy of T-Bird and restore my mail.

Setting up the addon gContacts to handle addresses from Gmail account

Now that my mail is setup I would like to keep my addresses in Thunderbird too. And an available addon called gContacts will do that. For simplicity here I’ll just say in Thunderbird go to Tools, Addons, look fro all available addons and search for gContact, install it and follow its directions.

Setting up addon Lightning and Google calendar provider

Like the Contacts, Google Calendars can be imported into an addon called Lightning and it can use an addon Provider for Google Calendar to make it see and interact with Google Calendar. Now you can use your phone app for Google Calendar and read it from thunderbird and the other way around.

This makes Thunderbird almost everything Outlook is for far less money so make a donation to Thunderbird and its addon providers and still save over the price of Microsoft solutions.