How to sync a Sony Ericsson phone with the Thunderbird/Lightning calendar

If you’re using the Mozilla Thunderbird extension Lightning for your calendar, here’s a quick howto on making it synchronize with your Sony Ericsson phone. It worked great on my W910!

  • Install the excellent freeware program MyPhoneExplorer.
  • Enter the Options (F2), choose Sync and then choose Thunderbird Lightning in the “Calendar” field.
  • MyPhoneExplorer will automatically install the required Thunderbird plugin.
  • Click on “Advanced” to choose which calendar to sync and what mode (merge calendars or let phone override Lightning or vice versa)
  • Hit Ok, enter the Calendar and hit sync – done!

If you want to create a desktop shortcut to automatically start the sync – duplicate the shortcut to MyPhoneExplorer, enter the icon properties and add “action=sync syncitem=organizer” to the destination (after myphoneexplorer.exe). There are more command line options available in the English FAQ.

Hope this howto helps someone, it sure made my life a lot easier! Before I discovered this method, I was auto-exporting the calendar as an ICS file (through a dedicated Thunderbird extension) and then importing in manually into MyPhoneExplorer on a regular basis. Now I only need to connect the USB cable and click the dedicated shortcut – quite an improvement!

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10 Responses to “How to sync a Sony Ericsson phone with the Thunderbird/Lightning calendar”

  1. Piotr says:

    In my case it doesn’t work!
    I can sync the contacts with my address book of Thunderbird, but can’t sync the calendar! In the sync options “Thunderbird Lightning” just doesn’t exist! MyPhoneExplorer behaves as though I had no Lightning installed. Any ideas what the reason is and how to deal with it?

  2. Janek says:

    Piotr, is the MyPhoneexplorer plugin/addon correctly installed in Thunderbird?

  3. Piotr says:

    MyPhoneExplrorer 0.14 sync-addin. It was automatically installed when I installed the MPE. I have it in the list of add-ins, but neither “Options” nor “Uninstall” buttons are available. Only “turn off” button is not faded and works. Is that normal?

    BTW, thanks for such immediate reply. I didn’t expect that, really, I appreciate it.

  4. Paps says:

    Thanks for this! It works well for me. The next thing to do is to try it with Ubuntu. =)

    Running on Windows Vista
    MyPhoneExplorer v1.7.5
    MyPhoneExplorer Synchronsation 1.0.31 (add-on for Thunderbird v3.0.4)

  5. Susanne says:

    Thank you so much! Works great!

  6. whatslatest says:

    Thanks…this is cool details ..Keep posting man

  7. Definitely imagine that which you said. Your favourite reason seemed to be on the net the simplest factor to keep in mind of. I say to you, I definitely get annoyed even as people consider worries that they plainly do not realize about. You managed to hit the nail upon the highest as smartly outlined out the whole thing with no need side effect , folks can take a signal. Will likely be back to get more. Thank you!

  8. Andy Chapman says:

    i dont have the option to select Thunderbird Lightning in the sync field? and ideas?

  9. Cintia Uvo says:

    I can’t make it work.
    I use Thunderbird 5 with lightning.
    When MyphoneExplorer tries to install the plugin it gives the message:

    “Folder structure from Thunderbird could not be listed!”

    Can you give me any clue about how to solve this?

  10. sony says:

    walkman…

    [...]How to sync a Sony Ericsson phone with the Thunderbird/Lightning calendar « Janeks random writings[...]…

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