Thushan Fernando Uncut

Since ditching Outlook after Outlook 2003 (Outlook 2007, 2003 was fine in comparison) came around I’ve been using Mozilla Thunderbird as my ever faithful email client. Its fast, lightweight and not as bloated as Outlook is – couple it with Lightning and you’ll be laughing!

Thunderbird 3 brings some cool features for users with the biggest being tabbed message windows (and calendars etc). If you downloaded the new 3.x betas make sure you get Beta 4, the long standing issue with the Messagebox Summary file being corrupt has been finally addressed. Its been a pet hate for a long time now, sometimes searching a folder can corrupt an MSF (means having to go and remove the MSF so it rebuilds the index!), no more! Thunderbird will now fixup any problematic MSF files in the background, yay!

The search in Thunderbird 3 is a massive improvement over the other clients I’ve used, give it a go!

After you download Thunderbird, make sure you get the latest nightly for Lightning Calendar Addon and Google Provider and use them.

I’ve moved my entire mailbox over to Gmail now, previously I was a firm believer in IMAP and didnt move to Gmail fully sooner because of the lack of folders – unlike in real life where my life is usually a mess, I keep my mail quite organised. Whats more, the junk mail filters are second to none.

Whilst the mail trickled down via POP3 (thank god for IMAP!) I had to manually get the contacts to be updated in gmail. Here’s how to get your contacts into GMail from thunderbird – and possibly other clients.

• Open your addressbook in Thunderbird.  Tools > Addressbook or {CTRL+2}
• Goto Tools > Export menu item
• We need a CSV file, change the default file type from LDF to ‘Comma Seperated’ and save it with an appropriate filename.
• Once exported, open up the CSV file in OpenOffice or Microsoft Excel.
• Heres where we get trippy. By default, when you export you will get these headers:
  • First Name
  • Last Name
  • Display Name
  • Nickname
  • Primary Email
• We need to make sure that we have the four main columns that GMail looks for:
  • First Name
  • Last Name
  • Display Name
  • Email Address
• Remove all the other columns (so Nickname, Secondary Email etc etc)
• Save the file as something else so we can go back to it later if required.
• Goto GMail, click Contacts and click ‘Import’ from the right panel header.
• Point to the CSV file you  just saved and let it import, you will find that the Display names are automajically resolved, duplicates trimmed and others merged.

Enjoy.