Shifting from Gmail to Thunderbird

After shifting away from Fastmail almost a year ago, I've been using Google Apps hosted email and calendaring almost exclusively for both work and personal email. In that time however I still was never totally satisfied using a web interface for something I used so intensively. Of course Gmail is an incredible web app but there are things that a rich client still does best. So now that Gmail supports IMAP natively, and since I had some spare time this weekend, I decided to have another crack at shifting my email life back to a rich email client. I've only been running this new setup for a couple of days and don't want to just re-organise for the sake of it, so we'll see how it goes over the next few weeks and evaluate at a later stage.

For the sake of my continued outboard brain experiment, here are all the steps, tips and gotchas I've discovered with the setup. This was all done in OSX Leopard, with Thunderbird 2.0.0.9, but the instructions should mostly be the same on Windows and Linux.

1. The first step is to take a look at this Lifehacker article on the overview of what we're doing. It discusses a rationale for what we're doing, advantages of the rich-client approach, and a whole bevy of hints and tips.
   
   
2. Once you're happy that you know why we're doing this, head over to the Mozilla site to grab the latest version of Thunderbird.
   
   
3. Follow all the instructions on the Lifehacker article including:
   - Set up Thunderbird correctly for Gmail IMAP (as documented in this Google tutorial)
   - Set up Thunderbird to use Gmail's Trash, Sent Items, and Spam folders
   - Install the GmailUI extension to add support for Gmail-like keyboard navigation and message archiving
   
   
4. Now if you've got the time and the bandwidth on hand, set up offline access to your email archive. Pretty damned handy for local search and for those times when you're connection less (yes it does happen every now and again).
   
   
5. Once you've got your messages downloaded you can set up Spotlight to index and search your emails. This is one of the fiddliest parts of the setup and as time of writing, still wasn't working for me :-(
   
   
6. Set up support for Growl new message notifications.
   
   
7. Install whatever custom dictionary you may need.
   
   
8. Export your Gmail contact list as a CSV file and import into Thunderbird. Unfortunately there is still no Mac Address Book integration, but there's probably an extension out there that does something along those lines. Wasn't a biggie for me so didn't spend any time researching it.
   
   
9. Check out some of these config hacks to see if any of them take your fancy.

Additionally you can GTD-enable your new email client, learn the keyboard shortcuts to speed up your email processing, enable your blogging engine to receive new blog posts via email for offline blog composition (what I'm doing now), or for the ultimate in geek-satisfaction you can set up Thunderbird to access your Google Calendar with full two-way synchronisation and multiple calendar support by following these excellent instructions. This hack makes use of two extensions, Lightning and Provider.

The one caveat I have with this calendar solution is to watch out for time zone issues. When you add a calendar event via GCal, it uses the calendar's pre-defined time zone as the time zone for the event you create. However Lightning (or Provider, not sure exactly who is responsible) uses the local machine time zone to display your event details. So you can have one event being displayed with two totally different times depending on your setup e.g. I currently have my calendar setup to use GMT however my local machine is configured to use CLST (Chilean Standard Time - I'm currently in Santiago), so my calendar events display with two totally different times depending on what interface I'm using. Not a biggie, but something you should definitely be aware of.

Well, I'll keep on using this setup for the next few weeks and see how I go. I'll be sure to post any problems or interesting 'behaviours' I may discover.