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For so long I’ve been trying to get my Thunderbird-based email addresses to sync with my BlackBerry. I tried to use Google Sync and a Thunderbird plugin to do it, but that’s a bit convoluted, if not ineffective. Today, I tip my hat to BlackBerry Cool, because they’ve got some instructions on how to do this in a different way. I’d still suggest my article from December to sync your Thunderbird calendar, but when you’re going for straight email, they’ve got the cure. After the jump, the steps — which, of course, are convoluted themselves.

1. Select an External Email Address. Select an email address that will be used externally, i.e. the email address you provide to others on your business card or otherwise. For this example, we will use fred@flintstone.com.

2. Configure Domain-Level Email Forwarding. Configure your domain-level email forwarding so that all incoming email addressed to fred@flintstone.com is forwarded to both a dedicated Blackberry address (fredflintstone@att.blackberry.net) and a dedicated Thunderbird address (fredthunderbird@gmail.com).

3. Configure Blackberry. Configure the dedicated Blackberry address so that the “Reply to:” address is fred@flintstone.com and the “Auto BCC:” address is fredthunderbird@gmail.com.

4. Configure Thunderbird. Configure Thunderbird to retrieve email from fredthunderbird@gmail.com; this will include incoming email sent to fred@flintstone.com as well as BCC email from the Blackberry. Configure Thunderbird so that the “Reply to:” address is fred@flintstone.com and the “Auto BCC:” address is fredflintstone@att.blackberry.net. Create a Thunderbird rule that is applied to all incoming email sent from fred@flintstone.com (which is BCC email from the Blackberry) that marks messages as “Read” and files them in the “Sent Items” folder.

Just follow those instructions and you should be fine. This also has the added benefit of not giving away your actual email address, which some might find comforting. Again, many thanks to BlackBerry Cool for finding this.

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