I previously never bothered with it. but I just did a fresh install of 12.04 and figured "hey maybe i'll put in my google account and see what happens" I logged in with google and everyting like mal/calendar/contacts/chat is set to "on"... I figured it might automatically set up my gmail for various applications like empathy and thunderbird.. but I opened them up and found nothing... What exactly is the purpose of adding your account to "online accounts"? where is it used?