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Setting up Thunderbird to Sync with Google Calendar:

1. Download the Lightning extension and the Provider extension and save them to your desktop.

2. Open Thunderbird, Click Tools from the Menu Bar and choose Add Ons.

3. On the lower left, click Install.

4. Click Desktop and choose the file: lightning-0.8-tb-macosx.xpi

5. When it finishes installing, you must restart Thunderbird.

6. After Thunderbird restarts, repeat Step 2-4 except you will choose the file: provider_for_google_calendar-0.4-tb+sb.xpi

7. Again, you will have to restart Thunderbird.

8. Log in to your Google Calendar.

9. Choose Settings in the upper right-hand corner.

10. Click on the Calendars tab.

11. Click on the name of the Calendar you would like to Syncronize.

12. Scroll to the bottom and under Private Address, click on the XML button.

13. A popup will appear with your private address. Copy this link.

14. Go back to Thunderbird.

15. Click on Calendar from the Menu Bar and choose New Calendar.

16. The New Calendar Wizard will open up.

17. Choose “On my network”.

18. In the next screen, choose Google Calendar and paste in the XML private address of your Google Calendar.
Note: You find this address in Steps 8-13.

19. Give the Calendar a name and Colorize the items.

20. Click continue and your calendar will be imported.

You are now synced and ready to go. You will see items from your Google Calendar appear. Any items you create will show up in your Google Calendar after the next sync. According to default preferences, the calendar will sync every 30 minutes. If you want to sync immediately, click on the Reload button in the menu bar.

Known Issues
I know, this whole thing sounds too good to be true. At least the known issues are minimal and mostly deal with alarms and reminders. When you create an event in Google Calendar, and set a reminder – all is fine on the Google side but Lightning won’t see it. If you create an event and give it a reminder in Lightning, Google Calendar will see it and register it, however it will only be a “pop-up” reminder, even if your defaults in Google are for email/SMS.

I researched this a bit and found that this is actually a bug within Sunbird/Lightning. Apparently it will only handle one alarm – popup. The entire alarm infrastructure within Sunbird/Lightning needs to be altered to accommodate multiple alarms.

Since I rely heavily on SMS reminders, My workaround is to create the event with no reminder. I then have to create another calendar event to remind myself to login to Google and change the required event’s reminders to SMS. Its annoying but this issue is known and hopefully will be addressed in a future update.

Alas, its not perfect but after two weeks of unsuccessfully trying to sync Google Calendar with iCal, the reminder issue is minor.

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