how can i sync my google contacts with my address book in thunderbird 153 esr?

The internet doesn't know all - it certainly DOES work!

The screens you see may vary a little depending on the version, but on Thunderbird 153.5.0esr...

- Go to the Address Book tab (<Alt+2>)

- Click the "Add address book" icon.

- Choose either "Sync from and existing account" (best choice if your Gmail account is already set up) or "Add remote Address Book."

Follow the prompts - your address book will be added.

thanks Lin for your response but, when i follow your guidance, i see that the gmail account that syncs with my phone is 'greyed out' with '1 of 1' in the little box next to it...

I will guess that when you first set up your Gmail account you didn't explicitly give Google permission to share the Contacts with Thunderbird. Try Removing it and adding it back in. If all goes well, it should respect your existing Authorization settings and allow Thunderbird's Address Book to connect with Google Contacts.

thanks again Lin but i'm not sure what i should remove and add back? my google contacts sync settings shows contacts synced with all of .my google accounts but thunderbird address books show some larger numbers of contacts for the same Gmail accounts and, although contacts appear to be synced from thunderbird to google , the reverse is not occurring...

Are you using an add-on to manage your Address Books? If you are, you shouldn't - the ability to sync Thunderbird's Address Books with Google Contacts has been built-in for years, and in fact, the popular gContactSync add-on stopped working a long time ago.

Do you use an maintain Address Books for multiple Google accounts? I would think that would be messy. Unless you have a specific reason for doing so, I would recommend that you merge them all into the contacts list of your primary Google account.

You can remove and add any remote Google address book at will. Since the contacts are stored on Google's servers, there's no danger of losing information. If you want to be extra safe, you could back them up by copying the contacts in the Google address book to a local address book before removing it. Or you could Export them to a VCF file.

So, what I would do is Remove/disconnect all my remote Google address books, then add them back in one by one. When that seems to be working properly, I'd merge all the various address books into my main Google address book.