But what I really need are the e-mail addresses, and these come through the import process fairly well.Īs soon as I begin to enter an address in the To: field of a new Thunderbird message, I'm able to select the addresses I'm sending to from a drop-down menu that lists all the addresses beginning with those letters. The import process isn't perfect expect a good amount of cleanup as information in different fields gets merged here and there. After you import your Google contacts, a new address book appears in Thunderbird that contains selected fields from your Google contacts. Click it to sync your Google contacts with Thunderbird. You'll also find the Zindus icon at the bottom of the main Thunderbird mail and address-book windows. When the import completes, a new address book appears in Thunderbird with the default name of the account from which the contacts were imported. Back in the Zindus configuration window, select the account, and click Sync Now to begin the process. Choose either Google or Zimbra, enter your address and password, choose the account you want to sync contacts with and whether to include Google suggested contacts, and click OK to add the account. Start by clicking Add to open the New Account dialog box. The Zindus Configuration Settings dialog lets you reset your sync options. Clicking it opens the Zindus Configuration Settings dialog box where you're presented with a handful of contact-sync options, including a Sync Now button. (I didn't test the program with Zimbra.)Īfter you download and install Zindus, a "Zindus" option is added to Thunderbird's Tools menu.
For Google, the fields imported include the contact's name, primary and secondary e-mail addresses, phone numbers, IM names, company, title, and notes. The program brings a subset of contact fields from Google and Zimbra into Mozilla's free e-mail program. Then I found the free Zindus add-on for Thunderbird.
The entire process was pretty worthless, overall. The few fields that did make the conversion were incomplete. Most of the contact information was squished into a single nondescript field for each record. The first time I attempted to use Mozilla Thunderbird's import function to bring my Gmail contacts into the client e-mail application, I was seriously disappointed with the results. Mozilla's free e-mail program is not particularly contact-friendly. The program missing from this contacts mega-merge was Thunderbird (download for Windows | Mac), and for good reason. A couple of weeks ago, I described how to sync contacts between Outlook, Gmail, and your iPhone.