{"id":294,"date":"2012-02-01T19:17:56","date_gmt":"2012-02-02T00:17:56","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/dmach.net\/blog\/?p=294"},"modified":"2012-02-12T23:38:03","modified_gmt":"2012-02-13T04:38:03","slug":"integrating-and-optimizing-thunderbird-for-google-mail","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/dmach.net\/blog\/2012\/02\/01\/integrating-and-optimizing-thunderbird-for-google-mail\/","title":{"rendered":"Integrating and Optimizing Thunderbird for Google Mail"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>Let&#8217;s admit it, gMail is awesome (some of you would beg to differ), especially when you use gApps like I do. But I&#8217;ve always had a few requirements:<\/p>\n<ul>\n<li>being able to access my most recent e-mail offline<\/li>\n<li>without using a browser<\/li>\n<li>large mailboxes (4+ GB)<\/li>\n<li>use of certificates to sign or encrypt e-mail<\/li>\n<li>integrated calendar, tasks, contacts<\/li>\n<li>multiple e-mail account support<\/li>\n<li>and recently, synchronize all this with my Android phone<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<p>My former method was to use Microsoft Outlook, but that program is riddled with problems and cumbersome. It also doesn&#8217;t seem to alert you when you have new mail if you use IMAP. Synchronizing Calendar and Contacts with my phone required a 3rd party program, which would be limited to just 1 calendar in Outlook and often create duplicate Contacts. On one occasion, the program got stuck with corrupted information and about half of the ~75 contacts in my list had about 25 copies each. (I fixed this shutting off Outlook &amp; the sync program, exporting all my contacts to a Google CSV, and removing the duplicates offline.)<\/p>\n<p>So in my quest for a more seamless &amp; less troublesome e-mail client, the only VIABLE non-browser e-mail client turns out to be Mozilla&#8217;s Thunderbird. However, integration with Google Mail isn&#8217;t seamless or without quirks.<br \/>\n<!--more--><br \/>\nMy Thunderbird installation required the following add-ons to run Thunderbird with some of Outlook&#8217;s best features:<\/p>\n<ul>\n<li>AlertSwitch (Enables &amp; Disables new alert with one click)<\/li>\n<li>Blinking Alert (enables Outlook-like &#8220;Desktop Alerts&#8221;<\/li>\n<li>Display Quota (displays the gMail quota)<\/li>\n<li>Google Contacts (Sync Contacts with Google)<\/li>\n<li>Lightning (Calendar for Thunderbird)<\/li>\n<li>Master Password (Security Enhancements, password protected TBird Access)<\/li>\n<li>MinimizeToTray (Because I don&#8217;t use the Windows 7 combined taskbar labels)<\/li>\n<li>Provider for Google Calendar (Sync calendars with Google)<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<p>Each add-on requires some configuration tweaks for setup and optimal behavior. The most complicated was setting up &#8220;Provider for Google Calendar&#8221; &#8211; follow each add-on&#8217;s instructions.<\/p>\n<p>After setting this all up, I had 6 e-mail accounts set up (IMAP), about 4 of which were Google Mail (Apps). The initial sync took a while &#8211; be patient as TBird will seem like it is frozen. But afterwards, it seemed to run smoothly&#8230; Until I re-opened the program or tried to send an e-mail, where it literally freeze for up to 10 minutes!<\/p>\n<p>After some troubleshooting, I narrowed it down to just a few settings. They are both due to gMail&#8217;s conversation\/relational e-mail nature operating at the server side.<\/p>\n<p>The first &#8220;setting&#8221; to disable is the option to sync the &#8220;All Mail&#8221; folder under &#8220;GMail&#8221;:<\/p>\n<p><a href=\"http:\/\/dmach.net\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2012\/02\/tbird.png\"><img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" class=\"alignnone size-full wp-image-301\" title=\"tbird-gmail1\" src=\"http:\/\/dmach.net\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2012\/02\/tbird.png\" alt=\"\" width=\"647\" height=\"698\" srcset=\"https:\/\/dmach.net\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2012\/02\/tbird.png 647w, https:\/\/dmach.net\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2012\/02\/tbird-278x300.png 278w\" sizes=\"auto, (max-width: 647px) 100vw, 647px\" \/><\/a><\/p>\n<p>&nbsp;<\/p>\n<p>And the other is to disable saving a copy of sent mail to the Sent folder:<\/p>\n<p><a href=\"http:\/\/dmach.net\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2012\/02\/tbird2.png\"><img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" class=\"alignnone size-full wp-image-302\" title=\"tbird-gmail2\" src=\"http:\/\/dmach.net\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2012\/02\/tbird2.png\" alt=\"\" width=\"647\" height=\"698\" srcset=\"https:\/\/dmach.net\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2012\/02\/tbird2.png 647w, https:\/\/dmach.net\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2012\/02\/tbird2-278x300.png 278w\" sizes=\"auto, (max-width: 647px) 100vw, 647px\" \/><\/a><\/p>\n<p>&nbsp;<\/p>\n<p>Why disable these settings? The former because the All Mail folder in IMAP is a redundant copy of EVERY e-mail in your account, Inbox, Sent, Drafts, all your labels, etc. By having TBird sync this folder every 2-5 minutes, or on every startup, it will take an eternity, especially with multiple mailboxes. The latter because gMail will AUTOMATICALLY create a copy of your sent mail in the Sent folder.<\/p>\n<p>By disabling these two options, I can still set my message size limit to 25KB and sync my past 30 days of e-mail across 4 Google Mail accounts without TBird freezing on my due to extended, extraneous syncing of redundant emails.<\/p>\n<p>I hope you find this useful if you use gMail with Thunderbird.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Let&#8217;s admit it, gMail is awesome (some of you would beg to differ), especially when you use gApps like I do. But I&#8217;ve always had a few requirements: being able to access my most recent e-mail offline without using a browser large mailboxes (4+ GB) use of certificates to sign or encrypt e-mail integrated calendar, [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[123,11],"tags":[125,183,181,180,176,177,178,85,187,179,133,174,188,184,185,182,186,175],"class_list":["post-294","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-android","category-tech-tips","tag-android-2","tag-calendar","tag-e-mail","tag-email","tag-freeze","tag-freezing","tag-gmail","tag-google","tag-integration","tag-mail","tag-microsoft","tag-mozilla","tag-optimize","tag-outlook","tag-productivity","tag-sync","tag-tasks","tag-thunderbird"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/dmach.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/294","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/dmach.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/dmach.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dmach.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dmach.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=294"}],"version-history":[{"count":11,"href":"https:\/\/dmach.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/294\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":307,"href":"https:\/\/dmach.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/294\/revisions\/307"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/dmach.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=294"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dmach.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=294"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dmach.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=294"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}