The Google Thunderbird address book: staying in sync
Configuring sync with Google is easy. Select an addressbook to sync with Google, and choose:
- Personal Address Book if you want contacts auto-added by Thunderbird to appear in Google. You’ll have one set of contacts.
- zindus/yourname@gmail.com if you want to manage your Google contacts separately from other contacts.
When you first sync an addressbook, you may encounter Google’s rules for contacts:
- an email address can only appear in one contact
- no empty contacts
These rules are enforced in Gmail’s contact interface and to sync with Google, your Thunderbird addressbook must comply with them too.
Early versions of the Zindus addon took a “hands off” approach to rule violations by simply reporting them.
The addon now displays a summary of Google rule violations:
In this example, three contacts reference the same email address. “bloggs,fred” is selected because it is the contact with data in the most fields.
‘Confirm’ preserves the selected contact and deletes the other two.
‘Skip’ leaves the contacts unchanged. You make the necessary edits using the Thunderbird addressbook.
Select ‘don’t ask’ if you want the addon to fix subsequent rule violations without asking:
- if several contacts reference an email address, the addon preserves the ‘best’ one and deletes the rest
- if contacts are ‘empty’ (meaning there is no data in any fields that map to Google) then they are deleted.
The ‘don’t ask’ feature is turned off by default. Rule violations are mostly fixed on the first sync and never encountered again. But a few users find themselves bumping into rule violations on an ongoing basis, possibly because of Thunderbird bugs or Google glitches. For these folks, the ‘don’t ask’ preference allows safety to be traded off against conveniece.
zindus/ToBeDeleted
As a nod to safety, unsynced contacts “deleted” when fixing Google rule violations are actually moved into a addon-managed addressbook named zindus/ToBeDeleted. This feature is a poor-man’s workaround to the absence of a “Trash for contacts” feature in Thunderbird or Google. zindus/ToBeDeleted is emptied frequently and its purpose is to assist with recovery of “oops, I chose the wrong contact” mistakes. Note that any Google contacts in this addressbook will only contain those fields that map to Thunderbird.
If you liked this Blog, share the love :
RSS Feed
October 7th, 2008 at 8:19 pm
WOW! Great, thanks!
October 14th, 2008 at 2:59 pm
This is a very smooth add-on and works great for me. Thanks for taking the time to produce a well crafted add-on.
November 6th, 2008 at 10:36 pm
Hi,
Thanks for this great plug in!
I’m trying to use Zindus to co-ordniate an address-book between OSx and Win Xp using a Google account and Thunderbird. The only problem currently is that it looses first-name and last-name data between the machines, which means if I try and export to back up to Mac address book I loose the names of the people!
Is there a fix for this?
Thanks again,
Lee
November 14th, 2008 at 2:16 am
Excellent add-on!! The autosync capability is currently bi-directional which is a bit dangerous for my application. I just deleted ALL my Gmail contacts when I cleared my thunderbird address book AFTER sync had been established…oops!
It would be nice to have a configuration setting to enable uni-directional syncing only i.e. from Gmail contacts to PAB but NOT vice versa. Most Gmail users now prefer to use Google’s web interface but it’s nice to have a minimal traditional mail client configured to send mail e.g. when the user right clicks a file and clicks “Send to”->”Mail Recipient”. The only problem with that solution up to now was that Gmail contacts were not available in the mail client address book…but that is now solved by Zindus…subject to the above feature request.
Keep up the good work!
November 14th, 2008 at 3:47 pm
Lee
Currently if you want to use Google to sync two thunderbird addressbooks, only the fields that are common to both thunderbird and google are synced.
A fully sync is certainly something that folk want. One thought is to use Google’s ExtendedProperties feature to store the full set of Thunderbird fields.
A problem with ExtendedProperties is that Google limits the number ExtendedProperties a contact can have. This means that the feature isn’t guaranteed to be available to the addon, so it might work for some users, maybe even most, but not all. It’s even possible that for any given user, it’d work for some contacts but not others. And even a small percentage of problems generates a lot of support email!
This isn’t to minimise the issue - we’re just not satisified that ExtendedProperties is the right approach.
rvjc
I’ll file a feature request to support one-way sync. If/when this gets implemented it really should support:
one way tb ==> google and
one-way google ==> tb
Like most other feature requests, if there’s enough interest, it’ll get put on the roadmap.
December 8th, 2008 at 2:01 am
At first, I didn’t think it worked. Then I restarted my Google and all my contacts showed up. Der! Wonderful. Very easy to use.
December 16th, 2008 at 12:32 pm
I think this is a great plugin, and plan to recommend it on my blog. One feature request: would it be possible to do one way syncs? I never edit info in Google Contacts, only in Thunderbird, and it would help me sleep better at night knowing that my Thunderbird data would not be touched.
December 16th, 2008 at 1:16 pm
Hi Tommy, +1 noted for you on one-way sync. It’s now one of the feature request candidates.
December 28th, 2008 at 7:22 am
Hah…….removed all my gmail contact when I accidently remove all contact in thunderbird addressbook. Accidents happens. Would be nice to have a confirmation or a basic security regarding removing contact from other than the gmail webmail access.
Great plugin. My usage senario :
1. One gmail account for the school
2. One gmail account for each teacher
All teachers sync to school’s contact list.
Works like charm. Thank you.
December 29th, 2008 at 4:30 pm
Has anyone else been experiencing an unresponsive script error?
I looked in my error console and it shows: Error: [Exception… “‘Failure’ when calling method: [gIMsgFolder::GetMessageHeader]” nsresult: “0×80004005 (NS_ERROR_FAILURE)” location: “” data: no]
Anyone know about this?
December 30th, 2008 at 7:42 am
Ben: Which version are you using? The unresponsive script message sometimes occurred with large (5000+ contact) addressbooks in versions 0.8.4 and earlier. This should have been fixed in 0.8.5. The message you see in the error console is a Thunderbird error, unrelated to the addon.
If you’re on 0.8.5 and getting an “unresponsive script” dialog box, you can click OK and the addon will keep syncing. To help identify exactly which part of the addon is causing the problem, it’d be helpful if you filed a bug report.
December 30th, 2008 at 7:50 am
Thank you. TB had not advised me of a new version. My address book has 3000+ contacts. I’ll download and try 0.8.5. Many thanks.
December 30th, 2008 at 8:44 am
Leni,
I did try 0.8.5, and it worked! Thank you. I don’t know how you can get the Mozilla site to advise Thunderbird that an upgrade is available, but I think this is a critical upgrade. Many thanks.
ben
December 31st, 2008 at 8:40 pm
This Plugin is great it works for me exactly what I needed. I would like to request if it is possible to have it not only sync contacts but but also groups with in the contact list. Thank you
Wayne