Question about multiple accounts and contacts

[Teletc]

Hi There,

Noob to Zimbra, so please be gentle

I have two email accounts. A gmail account and an ISP account. The ISP account is a standard pop/imap account with only mail support. Hence the gmail account provides cloud based calendar and contacts so I can sync them on multiple devices. I do not really wish to use the gmail account as an email account, as I have used the ISP account as my email contact for a long time now. Clearly that would be the easiest solution, but I love a challenge. However, it seems I am unable to tell the ISP plain imap account that it should use the gmail account for contacts when I try to send email from it. To get the "To" button to work in the compose window, I have to switch to the gmail account in the "from" selection, select the recipients, then switch back to the ISP account to make sure the email gets sent from that account.

Is there any way to tell the ISP account to use the gmail contacts, or alternatively, automatically sync the gmail contacts to the local contacts folder?

EDIT: OK I think something is not right. I exported all the gmail contacts and imported them all into the local contacts list, so I have a local duplicate of the gmail contacts. However, when using the ISP standard IMAP account, I still cannot click on the To: button (it is greyed out), or do lookups in the address field. I must be missing something. How do I get an email only IMAP account to use an address book?