Tagged: thunderbird

How to make Thunderbird fonts look like Outlook 2007

Well with Office 2007 came brand new serif, sans-serif, and monotype fonts. Here’s how to set them to look exactly the same in Thunderbird.

The 3 new default fonts from Office 2007 are:

Serif: Cambria
Sans-serif: Calibri
Monospace: Consolas

Word defaults these fonts to 11 pt. Which I switched to in my Outlook 2007 defaults, and they look quite good. The equivalent in Thunderbird’s pixels system is 15 px.

Tools -> Options -> Display

Colors

  • Text Color: Black
  • Background Color: White

Plain Text Messages

  • Use the following font: Fixed width font
  • When displaying quoted plain text messages: Style = Regular, Size = Regular, Color = White

Fonts for: Western

  • Proportional: Sans-serif, Size = 15
  • Serif: Cambria
  • Sans-serif: Calibri
  • Monospace: Consolas, Size = 14 (10.5 pt is the default for Monoscape in Outlook 2007)

Allow messages to use other fonts (you don’t want other people’s themes to look horrid do you?

Update: Even if you don’t have UTF-8 enabled by default, if you send an e-mail with extra character coding Thunderbird would recommend using it when you press Send. So leave the encoding section alone by default.

Tools -> Options -> Composition

HTML

  • Font: Variable Width
  • Size: Medium
  • Colors: Black/White

Send Options

  • Send the message in HTML anyway

Honestly, there are very few e-mail clients that do not support HTML. I think the BlackBerries are the last of the text/plain kind. Even they are getting software updates now that supports HTML e-mails.

Make sure your Account is setup to compose in HTML. Or else all of this effort will just fail.

Setting up Gmail IMAP in Thunderbird

Well no matter what I did I could not get rid of the [Imap]/Trash label on Gmail once I had it setup with Thunderbird. It’s even more annoying than Outlook’s Junk label because to me it feels more protruding. This guide explains how to do it the right way!

I would also add something to this as in Thunderbird you can set your IMAP home folder. So if on the initial creation of the profile you set your IMAP home folder to [Gmail] then it would display all the folders in a non-cascaded list. Looks more streamlined.

To get to it you have to go to Tools -> Account Settings, choose the Gmail account you want to change and go to Server Settings -> Advanced. Fill in “[Gmail]” for IMAP server directory and you’re set. It takes effect when you re-sync the folders, or a restart of Thunderbird would take care of it.

But yeah, this guide solves the Trash mystery.

howtogeek.com

Update on the cloud

Well updating on this cloud business. NuevaSync never synced my Google Contacts properly for City, Province and Postal Code fields. This resulted Google Maps on the iPhone to always use United States as the country when I look up someone’s location from the Contacts. So I gave up on that and just synced Google Contacts from iTunes like I did before.

Thunderbird’s Google integration is not perfect but much better than Outlook though. It loads much faster on IMAP folders. I’m using Providers for calendar sync and Zindus for contacts. While calendar works flawlessly. Contacts are only a partial sync.

There is no addresses being synced from Google to Thunderbird at all. Even when I turn on the Zindus option to do so. What happens instead is that when the address option is turned on and I input something into Thunderbird, Zindus would then update my Google Contacts with this new information. It would also move the existing address on Google into the notes section.

Granted this is not perfect but I have successfully replaced the need for Outlook.
NuevaSync would probably fix the current Google Contacts syncing with proper address formatting. As iTunes currently do this just fine with the exact same set of entries.

Living in the cloud

So many bloggers recommended NuevaSync prompted me to try it out and boy am I impressed. Now with this free Exchange sync I am totally in the cloud.

It took a couple of hours of exporting, importing and organizing but I managed to put everything in Outlook into Google’s online services. Contacts went into Gmail, Calendar went into Google Calendar and I was already using IMAP for emails so my inbox was already in sync with the existing Gmail.

Of course, this is all done on Google Apps. I like putting my already registered domain name to use.

I did notice one problem. Gmail contacts don’t sync addresses through NuevaSync to the iPhone very well. It works, but the City, Province, Postal Code sections on the iPhone aren’t being used. Instead that information goes to the 2nd Address line. That is pretty annoying, I manually fixed all the addresses I had and resynced to Gmail. Hopefully that would somehow miraculously tag them in Gmail so that it would stick. I have a feeling it won’t and if I resync the iPhone again.

Next step for me is to jump onto Thunderbird. It’s got the extensions to sync with the Google services and from the reviews it’s damn seemless. Time to get rid of this bloated Outlook crap.