Integrate Gmail with Thunderbird

While upgrading my Thunderbird email software tonight, I came across a great plugin that allows me to integrate my Thunderbird with my Gmail calendar that I thought I’d share.

First of all, I love Thunderbird, and yet one of the main features I was missing was linking it to a calendar. Having been using Outlook for the past few years, I was spoiled with an Exchange email account and was looking for ways to streamline my schedule.

First, you’ll need to do three things and I’m assuming you already have a working Gmail account:

1) Install or update to the latest version of Thunderbirds (links at the bottom)

2) Download the Lightning Calendar Plugin

3) Download the Vendor plugin for Google Calendar

Step one

Open Thunderbird and go to Tools – Add-ons – Install when prompted, navigate to lightning then google files (ending in the xpi extension). Restart Thunderbird.

Second step

Go to your Gmail account, login and click on the calendar option. Click on the calendar settings and go to the bottom of the options and click on the XML link. Now copy and paste the link shown to you.

Step three

Go back to Thunderbird and go to File – New – Calendar and select ‘On the network’.

Select Google Calendar and paste the link from before.

Give the calendar a name and press next.

Enter your username and password (check the remember option to save adding it each time) and voila, your Gmail calendar is now up and running with Thunderbird, it’s that easy!

links

mozilla thunderbird

lightning plugin

Google Cal. Vendor Plugin