Synching Email, Contacts and Calendar Part 1 of 4

Solution Outline

For some time I had been looking for a way to synchronise my email, contacts and calendar between all my devices, which at present include my work Windows 7 PC, my home MacBook Air, my iPhone 4 and iPad 2. Even though the are many different approaches to accomplishing this, for one reason or another I dismissed them until I arrived at the approach that I outline in the following procedure.

Firstly I suppose I should outline my current setup, if you have a similar configuration to me then perhaps this procedure can be of benefit to you also.

Firstly I have my own domain name (@firthwebworks.com.au) so whatever procedure I used would need to be able to work well using my own domain name rather than using a generic gmail or hotmail email account. Even though the solution I am about to propose does in fact use a gmail account, from the end users perspective, that is from those who receive my emails, they are receiving them from my domain name (@firthwebworks.com.au) rather than a gmail account (@gmail.com).

Secondly, I wanted to be able to sync between ALL my devices and because I have the Windows 7 box thrown in there, I dismissed using Apples iCloud services for synching. Now I’m sure there will be someone who will tell me that you can still use iCloud to synch Windows devices as well and that may or may not be the case, I am just offering a solution that works well, at least with me.

I use Mozilla Thunderbird as my email client as this has the required extensions available to facilitate the synchronisation procedure.

These are the main steps required to setup for synching, we will go into each in much greater detail in separate postings later.

1. Create a gmail email account and setup the “send mail as” feature to your domain email address. Create your google calendar. Forward all your email to your newly created gmail account. I will demonstrate the procedure to do this if you use a hosting company that uses cPanel for configuring your email.
2. Setup Thunderbird to allow synchronisation of your email, contacts and calendar. This procedure will require the use of three additional extensions, “Google Contacts”, “Lightening” and “Provider for Google Calendar”. This procedure is good for both my Windows 7 work box and my home MacBook Air notebook.
3. Setup your iPhone & iPad to synchronise with your email, contacts and calendar.

I have divided this procedure into a 4 part procedure, you are reading Part 1.

Lookout for Part 2 – Creating and Configuring Your Gmail Account.