Synchronizing with Thunderbird

Thunderbird is a feature-rich and mature mail client that can be turned into a full-fledged PIM. However, it lacks support for address book synchronisation via CardDAV and it also lacks the ability to automatically discover calendars and address books available on the server. Therefore, to synchronise with Nextcloud, add-ons are required, which can be easily installed through Thunderbird’s add-on manager.

Alternative: Using the CardBook add-on (Contacts only)

CardBook is an advanced alternative to Thunderbird’s address book, which supports CardDAV. You can have TbSync and CardBook installed in parallel.

  1. Click the CardBook icon in the upper right corner of Thunderbird:

../../_images/cardbook_icon.png
  1. In CardBook:

    • Address book > New Address book Remote > Next

    • Select CardDAV, fill in the address of your Nextcloud server, your user name and password

../../_images/new_addressbook.png
  1. Click on « Validate », click Next, then choose the name of the address book and click Next again:

../../_images/addressbook_name.png
  1. When you are finished, CardBook synchronizes your address books. You can always trigger a synchronisation manually by clicking « Synchronize » in the top left corner of CardBook:

../../_images/synchronize_cardbook.png

The old method: Manually subscribing to calendars

This method is only needed if you don’t want to install TBSync.

  1. Go to your Nextcloud Calendar and click on the 3 dotted menu for the calendar that you want to synchronize which will display an URL that looks something like this:

    https://cloud.nextcloud.com/remote.php/dav/calendars/daniel/personal/

  2. Go to the calendar view in Thunderbird and right click in the calendar menu to the left (where the names of the calendars are) to add a New Calendar.

  3. Choose On the Network:

../../_images/new_calendar.png
  1. Choose CalDAV and fill in the missing information:

../../_images/CalDAV_calendar.png

Fix for Thunderbird 60

If you are still using Thunderbird 60, you need to change a configuration setting to make CalDAV/CardDAV work around Thunderbird bug #1468918 as described here.