Setting up a Gmail account in Mozilla Thunderbird

I write this post in order to share my experience with my Gmail account in Thunderbird.

The first problem I faced involved contacts. When I wrote my first message, I didn't enjoy the comfort of predictive contact suggestion (because I hadn't any contacts stored on my local machine). I solved it through a plugin: Zindus. Zindus syncronizes your contacts between Thunderbird and Google Contacts. Its use is pretty straightforward. Once you've installed the plugin, you go to the “tools” menu and select “Zindus”. Then add your gmail account, select the convenient options and click on “Sync Now” before you finish. Voilà. Contacts loaded, suggestions enabled.

The second thing I missed was the conversation thread-style that Gmail provides. I installed another plugin again: ThreadVis. It works like a charm. In fact, it has a fun feature that Gmail doesn't have: a timeline of the conversation. The following picture is an example of what I'm talking about:

In the picture, the empty circles represent my messages. The filled ones refer to other participants in the conversation (one color per participant). The separation between each circle represents the time it has passed between each message.

I also changed the relative position of the reply to the quote. The settings by default put the reply bellow the quote. This is not the way Gmail behaves and I found it a little bit confusing and counterintuitive. In order to change this go to “Edit > Account Settings... > Compositing and Addressing”. On the window you shoud see a checkbox that says “Automatically quote the original message when replying”. Check it if it isn't. Below that checkbox, you can select the following option from the drop-down list: “start my reply above the quote” and, if you use a signature, you can also select where to place it. It works, but you have to place an enter between the reply and the quote, otherwise Gmail won't hide the quote.

Finally, I set up my Google Talk account. Everything works fine. However, there are a few things that I haven't been able to fix and that I miss:

• Sync Gmail labels with Thunderbird. Maybe there's a way, but I haven't been able to do so. Here, people say it's impossible:
  http://superuser.com/questions/48591/how-do-i-synchronize-thunderbird-tags-with-gmail-labels
  Nevertheless, the message is old. Perhaps, this issue might be already solvable with a plugin.
  
• An Android icon next to the contacts in Google Talk. Actually, Thunderbird provides you information about the devices your contact is connected to. If you put the mouse pointer on the contact, Thunderbird retrieves this information. Nevertheless, I'd rather prefer the icon. I find useful to know if my contacts are chatting from an Android device, because that way I know I'll probably have to wait more for replies, links are going to be visualized on a phone and that sort of things.
• I have to delete conversations message by message. Gmail allows you to remove an entire conversation easily. The good news is that deleting messages is synchronized between Gmail and Thunderbird.

Feel free to post a comment if you've found this post useful or have any suggestions to solve any of the problems I still experience.