Also see the FAQ for thunderbird contact sync.

What is synchronized?

Thunderbird’s “Personal Address Book” syncs with Google Contacts.

Or you can sync Google Contacts with a Thunderbird addressbook named after your Google email address.

What isn’t synchronized?

Zindus doesn’t sync Thunderbird mailing lists. Lists and the contacts in them are ignored.

This feature is on the roadmap.

Contact conversion

Thunderbird and Google don’t support exactly the same set of contact fields.

Here is the list of Google contact fields that map to Thunderbird:

• Full Name
• Primary Email address and Second Email address
• Phone Numbers: Home, Work, Work Fax, Pager, Mobile
• Instant Messaging (AIM)
• Company and Title
• Notes

Postal addresses fields aren’t synced by default because of differences in field formats, but there is a workaround.  See the blog post on Google and Thunderbird postal addresses.

Where Google supports multiple values for a contact field, Zindus syncs the first of those with Thunderbird. So if a Google contact has two mobile phone numbers, only the first of those numbers is synced with Thunderbird.

Where a contact on one side of the sync has fields not supported by the other, Zindus tries to preserve the unsupported fields during an update by merging the updated contact into the overwritten contact.

Thunderbird and Google Addressbook differences

Google requires unique Email Addresses

In Thunderbird, an addressbook in which two contacts have an address of “mary@example.com” is perfectly ok. Many contacts can refer to the same email address.

Google requires that an email address can only appear in one contact. If you have a contact with an email address of “mary@example.com” and try to add a another contact that refers to “mary@example.com” you’ll get a “conflict” error.

Zindus detects conflicts, and offers advice on how to remedy them. Generally the easiest way to resolve conflicts is:

• For each address, locate each contact in the corresponding addressbook. If your conflicting contacts are in both Thunderbird and Google it can help to have both Thunderbird and Google addressbook windows open at the same time.
• Decide which contact is the preferred version, then delete the others
• Before deleting contacts, update the preferred version with any information that you want to keep.
• The preferred contacts will then sync to the other side

If you want to get synced quickly without having to resolve conflicts between Personal Address Book and Google, change the “Sync Google Contacts With” setting to zindus/yourname@gmail.com - see what is synchronized.

No empty contacts

Without ever noticing it, you may find that you have contacts in your Thunderbird Addressbook that don’t have an email address but do have data in some of the other fields, such as FirstName or LastName. If none of the Thunderbird contact fields map to Google contact fields, then as far as Google is concerned, it’s an empty contact, which Google doesn’t allow.

Thunderbird contacts of this sort can’t be synced. Your options are:

• edit the contact to add a Display Name or email address (even a fake one would be ok)
• move the contact into a different Addressbook so that it isn’t synced with Google

It’s also possible for a Google contact with no email address or Display Name to map to a completely empty Thunderbird contact.  Contacts of this sort aren’t synced with Thunderbird.  If you want such contacts to sync, give them an email address or Display Name.