Thunderbird for Gmail Addicts

In order to encourage myself to check the Eclipse newsgroups more often, and to possibly reduce my bandwidth usage (thanks to Rogers' new pricing plan), I decided to try to use Thunderbird for my mail instead of Gmail (in a browser such as Flock, Firefox, or Iceweasel).

Once you've got Gmail configured to do IMAP and Thunderbird configured to connect to Gmail, there are a few things you can do to get back the Gmail experience.

• To sync your Google Contacts w/ Thunderbird, use Zindus. This is required because Gmail's contact exporter only works w/ Gmail and Outlook. Note that this works best if you have no contacts already in Thunderbird -- or at least no duplicate entries.
  
  
• To get back some Gmail shortcuts (j/k to navigate, y to archive) & Gmail search expressions, install GMailUI.
  
  
• To set default sort order in views to 'newest on top':

  Edit > Preferences > Advanced > Advanced Configuration > Config Editor... > type "sort" > set mailnew.default_sort_order = -1

• To set message reply to be above the quoted message instead of below:

  Edit > Preferences > Advanced > Advanced Configuration > Config Editor... > type "reply" > set mail.identity.default.reply_on_top = 1

• To hide labels (mailboxes) which have no new messages, you can either select View > Folders > Unread, or you can click these tiny buttons to cycle the Folders view:
  
  
• To default-filter your mailboxes to show only unread, use View > Messages > Unread. Or, use View > Threads > Unread or Threads with Unread, if your prefer.