Gmail contacts in Thunderbird – Here is the simple way to get it done.
Thunderbird is known for its simple yet intuitive graphical user-interface that has made emailing much simpler for non-advanced users. One of its extraordinary features is the address book and how it can help you manage your contacts and mailing lists. However, it is not without its limitations.
If you just added a Gmail account, you would have noticed by now that it only gets your emails from the servers and not the contacts. The contacts associated with Gmail or Google account are not synced by ordinary means (like IMAP sync protocol).
This article discusses how you can work around the issue and get all your Gmail contacts in Thunderbird.
Way to Import Gmail Contacts in Thunderbird
There are various ways to do so but most of them are unnecessarily complicated and time consuming. Especially now, because now, there are many plugins/addons that you can take full benefit from. Using these extensions, you can stretch the default functionality of Thunderbird and make it even better for your specific purposes. One of the ways you can do so is by using a contact/address book extension that will help you in many ways not possible by the in-built and default features.
Currently, the one really interesting addon to import your Gmail contacts in Thunderbird is called “CardBook”. It not only lets you import contacts but also sync with Gmail. So basically, many similar addons can create a copy of all your Gmail contacts, but this one does not create a copy but keeps them in sync. Any changes made are reflected back on your Gmail account.
More than that, ‘CardBook’ has hosts of other unique features that make address book and mailing lists management much more efficient.
- Color codes each address book
- Set Address book in ‘read only’ mode
- Share an entire address book with other users
- Import and export options
- More efficient ways to create mailing lists
- And many more
How to get addons?
- Click on the ‘Settings’ icon on the top right-hand side. It looks like three horizontal lines stacked on each other.
- Click ‘Addons’
- Here, you can search for any extensions you want to install. There is also a ‘recommendations’ tab that suggests some of the most popular, helpful, and highly rated extensions.l
- Here you can also install themes that changes the overall “look and feel” of the Thunderbirds’ interface
In this way, you can get your Gmail contacts in Thunderbird for Mac or Windows.