Zire 31, Thunderbird, and Palmsync

I have a new Palm now. I had a Palm Vx and didn’t use it much ever. I recently found Audible (audio books online) and was able to sign up with them for a 12-month deal to get a new device much cheaper. [My MP3 player (Rave-MP ARC 2.5) won’t play Audible content.]

So I got a PalmOne Zire 31. It’s a definite upgrade from the PalmVx, not the best out there by far, but better than what I had. It was under $40 to have it bought & shipped to me (ordered on Saturday and it was here onthe very next Friday), with the added bonus of an “MP3-kit” consisting of a card reader and usb cable, stereo mini jack headphone (earbuds), and a 128mb Expansion Card, all a free bonus on the Palm One site with this purchase.

Sign up with Audible and get a code, then go to Palm One and buy your choice. I bought the cheapest new item, I wouldn’t have bought a new Palm for full price. I had been interested in getting AudibleListener since BEFORE I thought about needing a new device for mobile use of their content. So putting both sides of it together, it was a good deal.

Now I’m going down a path of frustration though. I use Thunderbird for email. I used to use Outlook. Now that I have an active Palm again, I want to sync to my address book … and there is an extension for Thunderbird called “palmsync” but it won’t work for me. I’ve read ever article online I can find and tried a million ways to do everything, and the thing is, it won’t work.

I have a moz conduit log set up and when I do a HotSync something calls the palmsync conduit … but does nothing else at all.

The other thing is about email. I used to have the functionality of being able to write an email on my PalmVx and when I synced to my PC the mail would get put into Outlook and it would go out when Outlook next sent mail.

I have no such functionality without being able to sync to Thunderbird, and there isn’t an email sync feature for Thunderbird in the first place. There is no “mail” feature on my Zire 31 either. Now I don’t know what changes have been made, but in the ‘old days’ with my Palm Vx there was a sometimes troublesome way of getting Outlook to sync to the Palm. Now it’s looking like it’s pretty standardly set up, though I don’t know, since I uninstalled Outlook along with the whole MS Office suite, and can’t even “test” with it.

Since I quit using Outlook I’ve started using emails with my domain, IMAP … and I know that I’ve NEVER liked Outlook with IMAP. Ugh. I can’t go back, I don’t WANT to go back. I love Thunderbird.

So I’m just not sure what I’m doing right now. I mean, I’ve read so much on this in the last 18 hours, I’ve deleted things, reinstalled extensions, HotSync’d a million times. I don’t HAVE to have my emails in the handheld, I only want my address book and the ability to MAKE A MESSAGE to send later.

So I’m stuck.

Otherwise, I like the nice blue handheld, the Zire 31. But it’s gonna make me spend more money to get a hard case for it, and this and that …

I hope that someone with ‘codability’ can get a Thunderbird Address Book fix out there. And that someone can get an email utility setup …yeah, free, yes, Gnu. That would be loverly.