Miranda Galadriel Capra

Sync Thunderbird Address Book to Palm

This page is based on my experiences with Thunderbird 1.0.2 and both Windows 2000 and Windows XP.

I have made this work with Thunderbird 1.0.2

The final trick for me was to quit the hotsync manager, install the Contacts Sidebar extension, and restart Thunderbird. I then started the hotsync manager and sucessfully synced. You can then uninstall the Contacts Sidebar. See below for a discussion of this trick.

I initially created this page when I sucessfully synced my Sony Clié address book to Thunderbird 0.3. I have step-by-step instructions for how I did this below.

Basic Steps for Thunderbird 1.0.2

Here are the steps that I used to get it to work for me. At this point you can now uninstall the Contacts Sidebar if you want - HotSyncing will still work.

More Details

Download palmsync.xpi from the Thunderbird Address Book Palm Sync Bug report
https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=214407
This is the official Bugzilla bug report. It should always contain the most recent, official information about the status of this bug. It should also contain a link to the most recent palmsync.xpi extension file. The last time I checked, the official home of the palmsync.xpi file is here:
http://ftp.mozilla.org/pub/mozilla.org/thunderbird/extensions/palmsync/

mozillaZine Knowledge Base - PalmSync (Thunderbird)
http://kb.mozillazine.org/PalmSync_(Thunderbird)
Presumably this page will also have the latest information about the extension. Make sure that you click the "discussion" tab to see comments added by visitors to the wiki. Several other mozillaZine forums discuss this issue. Try browsing through palm sync, Palm Sync Thunderbird 0.5, Mail Sync for Palm Working!, Palm Sync?, Palm Sync address book, and email on a PDA (Sony Clie).

Check your conduit registry key
HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\U.S. Robotics\Pilot Desktop\ApplicationX
After you have installed the extension, the conduit to do the syncronization places all of its information into this key, where X is an integer. Look for the one where the "Name" is "Mozilla Address Book". Check to make sure that "Conduit" is set to the location of mozABConduit.dll, probably something like "C:\Program Files\Mozilla Thunderbird\mozABConduit.dll". The "Priority" key sets whether handheld overrides desktop or desktop overrides handheld.

Check your palm.exe registry key
HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\App Paths\palm.exe
Make sure this points to the location of palm.exe on your system. Some discussion is available here: https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=182573#c2

Try installing the Contacts Sidebar
The mozillaZine article claims that this is unecessary, but I have seen tons of posts on various discussion boards. When I saw that even the discussion page for the mozillaZine article had claims that it worked, I decided to try it myself. I used Jack Southworth's procedure, and poof! It synced.

I was then able to uninstall the Contacts Sidebar extension and syncing still worked, so it appears that having it installed is not essential - perhaps it does something in the install process that the palmsync extension forgets or messes up? If anyone figures out why this trick works, let me know and I'll update this page.

Try updating Palm Desktop and HotSync
The palm.html file that comes with the 2004-11-10 version of palmsync.xpi claims that it requires Palm Desktop 3.5.3 or greater and HotSync 3.1.1 or greater. I was able to download much newer versions of both for my Clié from Sony Support. If you have Palm hardware, you can download from palmOne.

Create a log file for the conduit
If you set up the conduit to create a log file, you may be able to diagnose your problems more easily. If nothing appears in the logfile, then the conduit is probably not getting called at all. Here are the steps: This is based on info from the Feature Test Spec and a comment by David Bienvenu (current owner of palmsync.xpi).

I found that after I had installed the palmsync extension but before I installed the Contacts Sidebar the log file was created, and a line went into it each time I synced, but nothing was happening. Once I got sycning to work, the log file generated lots of information. My guess is that the logfile will be more helpful if you're having problems with HOW the syncing works, but it wasn't that helpful when the syncing wasn't working at all.

Read palm.html
palmsync.xpi is basically a zip file - if you rename it palmsync.zip you can look at the individual files. Inside of it is a file called palm.html - this has instructions on how to install the extension, and some tips for getting it to work with Mozilla. (They didn't help me with Thunderbird, but YMMV.) This file also contains some information I've not seen in other places, such as:

Other Interesting Pages
These are some other interesting pages I found that might have information that would be useful to you.

Instructions to Sync Thunderbird 0.3 to Palm

 This is how I set up Thunderbird 0.3 to sync its address book to my Palm address book using the Palm Desktop and HotSync Manager for Windows 2000 (Palm Desktop 3.1.2, HotSync Manager 4.0). Thunderbird 0.5 now comes packaged with a palm synchronization conduit, so these steps are probably no longer necessary.

Some of these steps may be uneccessary, but hey, it worked.

This is a summary of tips from

Download palmsync.xpi

Run PalmSyncInstall

  • cd into c:\temp\palmsync
  • run PalmSyncInstall.exe
  • If you have any trouble, try this: then run again

    Install Thunderbird

    Install PalmSync into Thunderbird

    Try to hotsync

    Other Notes

    The default is that the palm overrides the desktop. If you already have addressbooks loaded into Thunderbird, you may end up with duplicate entries, in which case you may have to annoyingly delete the duplicted entries BY HAND and FROM THE PALM (yuck).

    There is a SLIGHT possibility that going into the registry key for ApplicationX and changing "Priority" from 2 to 1 will set it so that the desktop overrides the Palm (see the bottom of http://www.geocities.com/Heartland/Acres/3216/users_dat.htm )

    If you get a thunderbird error something like "a previous install did not complete," go into c:\MozillaThunderbird and delete xpicleanup.dat.

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