How It Works

I read some time back of a plugin that allows you to sync your Thunderbird/Lightning calendar (or Sunbird if you prefer to use Mozilla’s calendar in a standalone application) with your Google calendar, which I’m sure is useful for some people, but not me. I’ve never used a Google calendar really. However that memory proved useful when I heard that a Google have released a utility to allow you to sync your Google calendar with your Outlook calendar. I’m sure you can see where I’m going with this…

If Google calendar can sync with Outlook and can also sync with Thunderbird/Lightning Surely it would be possible to sync your Thunderbird/Lightning calendar with Outlook via Google. For once, I was delighted to find out that it works just like you’d expect. Download Google’s little sync tool and it does everything very intuitively. Next, on your home PC the one with the Thunderbird calendar) you’ll need to download and install the Provider for Google Calendar Thunderbird add-on. You’ll need to share your Google Calendar (login and go to Settings then Calendar. Choose your calendar name and get the “Private Address” for the XML feed (copy it to the clipboard).

Back to Thunderbird go to File -> New Calendar. Select “on the network” and if you’ve installed the Provider plug-in properly there should be an option for Google Calendar. Choose this and then paste the URL of your Calendar’s XML into the Location field. That’s pretty much it (just name the calendar). Everything should sync up automatically from that point. Wonderful! If you’ve done something wrong, there are more detailed instructions available.

How It Doesn’t Work

Sadly it’s not that wonderful. You see, Google Calendar doesn’t support tasks, only events. So you can get reminders about upcoming events, but you can’t create tasks. Of course you can cheat and create events instead of tasks, but one problem with this is that you can’t mark events as “completed”. Since I’m only a low-level minion at work, most of my use for Outlook (besides email) is to remind me of what tasks I need to do, not meetings I need to go to. There is a petition to have tasks added to Google calendar and it seems there are plans to include them, but were not there yet. When they are though, hopefully the provider for Lightning will be updated and this ability to sync via Google will be really very useful indeed.

This one resolves a long-standing issue with Mozilla’s Thunderbird email client, ie the way it forwards messages.  Whereas Outlook, Outlook Express etc. forward some headers (to, from, subject, date etc) all you ever get in Thunderbird is “Sendername said:”.  It’s pretty pathetic really, especially the fact that there’s no date.

Luckily someone has made an add-on with the descriptive but not exactly ‘roll-off-the-tongue’ name “Change quote and reply format” to fix this problem. Now the quote header is much more useful:

—- Original message —–
From: sender@provider.com
To: recipient@provider.com
Subject: something
Date: 01/01/2005

Unfortunately it doesn’t seem to be listed at Mozilla’s plugin site, so I only stumbled on it after googling a bit and reading a few forum pages.  The home page (linked above) isn’t very well designed, but there’s a more user-friendly description of the plugin at The Extensions Mirror.

Background

As I mentioned in previous posts, I’ve just upgraded to Vista. Having investigated a couple of ways to export my Thunderbird Mail (in mbox format) to the new Windows Mail or Outlook I came to the conclusion it wasn’t possible to do so and retain my folder structure, as the mbox2eml program, for example, seemed to just create all my messages in one folder.

When I read in PC Pro magazine that Thunderbird 2.0 had been released (Thunderbird 1.5 for some reason didn’t think it important to let me know), I decided to give it a go instead. Sure enough I just copied and pasted my mailbox into the new profile it created on Vista (for some reason in the “Roaming” settings directory rather than the ‘this computer’ directory) and I was up and running in seconds.