The inconvenient truth is that traditional IT departments continue to dismiss exactly what technology is supposed to do. Make human interaction and communications simpler, easier, and more clear & honest. Simply using the same security scare tactics doesn’t work in the larger world, it only works in those organizations that choose to believe the lie.

Cheers!
R

http://www.allfacebook.com/report-one-in-five-facebook-users-encounter-malware-2010-11

http://www.eweek.com/c/a/Security/Facebook-Privacy-Malware-and-Data-Breaches-Lead-News-725147/

http://futureoftheinternet.org/malware-on-facebook

http://www.csmonitor.com/Innovation/Horizons/2010/1124/Facebook-remains-thick-with-malware-report

http://www.f-secure.com/weblog/archives/00001517.html

Social media still has no demonstrable value in business; the only demonstrable value is the lost productivity from office workers spending too much time online.

It took a long time to copy and paste contacts into the Google contacts list (which I installed on TBird using the add-on) and that is reasonably OK. The calendar was a puzzle though because, having installed the Google calendar on TBird, and manually transferred existing events to it (again a pain but it’s done now), I found that any events created on Android didn’t sync with the server or with TBird. Tech support for the phone eventually (after 3 calls) found the solution – when the Google calendar installs on the phone it doesn’t disable the default calendar, so any new events are created in that but not in the Google one. The system doesn’t warn about this of course, which is a recognised fault. So all that’s necessary is to disable the default calendar, and it works. I had to disable the Google default to set alarms for every event – this overrides the TBird setting.

I do get a lot of irritating error messages in TBird which thinks I am offline and can’t update data. This I think is just server latency.

I am unable however to crack the problem of tasks – very important for me. There doesn’t seem to be any add-on that copes with this. The only possible work-around is to create events that I call tasks, but that isn’t at all ideal.

So progress has been made, but there is more needed!

Likewise, for Thunderbird, there are many ways to sync data, but it’s not consistent from one tool to another. Your results are not unusual, unfortunately.

For me personally, I took a different route since I wrote this two years ago. I simply gave up using a software email client, and exclusively use Gmail. With Android, this has become the simplest, easiest, most efficient method for dealing with email.

While that works for me, I do understand how many folks may prefer an email client. I don’t have any other suggestions to try other than jumping on the Google Groups for Gmail and see what other Gmail users may have for suggestions in using Thunderbird, Outlook, or another email client. There are solutions out there that may help.