Email Clients and Calendars

[Anonymous]

What are your favorite email and calendar apps? I ask because up until now I have been using Thunderbird with Lightening and Provider Google Calendar. It has had some issues lately with logging into the calendar. It keeps asking for username/password for google authorization every time it’s started. After searching and reading a tonne no one seems to have a fix so I tried Evolution. It didn’t bring in too much stuff and since I already use Xfce some of the libraries already exist I assume.

After setting it up and testing for a bit it seems to work quite well(never used it before). With it running it uses very little resources especially compared to Thunderbird and I have not had any authorization issues. It just seems to work. I find it a bit clunky but should get used to the interface in no time.

What do you use? What are your opinions?

eriefisher

[Brian MasinickModerator]

Hi eriefisher! I’ve missed hearing from you and I am glad to see you once again participating in the forum, even as I have not been quite as active writing as I once was. I’m now retired, so I continue to be busy, but much more with family and friends, and also much more with unplanned activities, which sometimes limits activity in technology forums.

I increasingly use Web-based browsers and clients, which allow me to use tools regardless of the platform or the location. I’ve shed a few PCs over the past year and I’m down to one multi-boot Linux laptop on a Dell Inspiron 5558, a Chromebook and an Android-based phone, so you can see why the focus on Web-based tools has increased so much.

I used to use Thunderbird a LOT as an Email client, but even back then, I’d typically keep the messages available so I could access them from multiple sources, since I’ve always had more than once device available. It’s been a few years since I’ve even used Thunderbird; if I use an Email client at all, it’s likely to be in a Seamonkey build that I’m testing. Otherwise I just use Web-based clients from a wide variety of test Web browsers, often beta or even nightly builds of browsers, backed up by many different stable Web browsers too. I have a couple on all the devices, even the Chromebook and Android devices.

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Brian Masinick
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[Brian MasinickModerator]

For calendar, I almost always use my phone’s calendar; my wife and I both use them and synchronize our calendar events often; it’s usually a phone-modified version of Google Calendar.

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[Anonymous]

Hey Brian,

Congratulations on your retirement. I might be heading that way myself sooner than expected.

I like to use a client that syncs with google. I use the google stuff just for convenience especially with my phone and tablet and on my laptop I prefer a client just because I find web browsers are so heavy these days and hard on resources. I use chrome mainly since Firefox got real buggy a while back and I believe they have had some internal changes. I don’t pay much attention anymore.

For the most part the Google stuff just works and well for my needs. Just looking for the best option(for me) on the desktop/laptop.

Trout season opens tomorrow so you might see a little less of me.

eriefisher

[Brian MasinickModerator]

Glad you will be able to get some fishing in soon, hence your forum name!

I’m in South Carolina now and it feels like late Spring or even Summer much of the time here in the past month. April in South Carolina is one of the most beautiful times of the year, with one exception: for those who are sensitive to pollen in the air, it’s like May in New Hampshire: flying green stuff everywhere!

I still enjoy it and the pollen does not bother me. Have not been able to fish, but I have been able to get outside often and walk. We have some nice trails, many either paved or neatly groomed nearby.

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[Anonymous]

South Carolina is beautiful. I spent a week on Hilton Head Island. Traveled around the state a bit. We hit Charleston then got the hell out of there. Way to busy for me. Spent a day touring the Magnolia Plantation. What a fantastic place. If you’ve never been you got to get there.

eriefisher

[Brian MasinickModerator]

Anonymous wrote:

South Carolina is beautiful. I spent a week on Hilton Head Island. Traveled around the state a bit. We hit Charleston then got the hell out of there. Way to busy for me. Spent a day touring the Magnolia Plantation. What a fantastic place. If you’ve never been you got to get there.

eriefisher

We live in the Northwestern corner of South Carolina. Our postal code says Greenville, SC, but we’re only 5 minutes from a really nice, small (though growing).

Though the ocean coastline is undoubtedly interesting, day to day, I’ll take where we are; it’s beautiful and the weather is not as extreme as some other regions in the South.

We will eventually take a 1-2 day trip to the Coast. I’ve already lived on the East Coast in New England, so I’m not craving the water; we do have some nice bodies of inland water nearby that we’ve already enjoyed.

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[seaken64Member]

Like Brian, I mostly use my phone for calendar. At work I use Chrome browser and always have a tab open for Google Calendar, and also one for G-mail.

I use Thunderbird to archive only. I do not use it anymore to day-to-day e-mails.

When Brian mentioned craving the water I thought of how I do sometimes feel land-locked now after having grew up next to the water of Puget Sound up until I moved out here to the Catskills at 23 years of age. I see the Hudson River almost weekly but I miss the salt water of the Sound and the ocean. We try to do an ocean trip to Rhode Island or Maine/NH once a year.

I live in the NYC watershed and you can’t even touch the water here without getting arrested!

Seaken64

• This reply was modified 7 years, 5 months ago by seaken64.

[Brian MasinickModerator]

I pulled up this old thread because I was looking at text editor and Web browser stuff and found two of my long time forum friends here, eriefisher, who has been quietly using antiX and other Linux distributions nearly as long as I have, and seaken64, who does much the same.

Greetings to both of you; to check out a matter, I downloaded the original UNIX editor, ed, which has since been either ported or rewritten for Linux. It’s small and simple; turns out there are a couple editors that come very close to the small size that are nearly as functional; levee is an incredibly small vi redo; virtually no documentation, but it appears to run almost identically to the original vi. Then there is mg, another small editor that has a similar feel, minus the fancy stuff, as an Emacs-like editor. That’s me, the browser and editor geek!

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[PPCMember]

I guess this thread is perfect for commenting that the new version of Thunderbird: Supernova is out. For now it’s available at the official site: http://www.thunderbird.net
It’s been redesigned, but I’m so used to the current layout that I probably won’t upgrade, at least not on my work computer…

P.

[Brian MasinickModerator]

PPC wrote:

I guess this thread is perfect for commenting that the new version of Thunderbird: Supernova is out. For now it’s available at the official site: http://www.thunderbird.net
It’s been redesigned, but I’m so used to the current layout that I probably won’t upgrade, at least not on my work computer…

P.

Aren’t you “a little young” (still in your forties) to be in this thread PPC?
Just kidding; Eriefisher mentioned preferring the use of a standalone Email client,
and a few years ago moved from Thunderbird to Evolution.

I’ve used just about any approach you can think of; I’ve used super basic UNIX Email clients like mail and mailx, the Rand Email program MH, with and without different formats, such as MH, xmh, exmh (TCL/Tk), I’ve used Outlook and Outlook Express when I’ve been on commercial work computers, I’ve used private, corporate Mail programs, I even briefly worked at Dartmouth College in Hanover, NH; they were migrating from their own homegrown Email system to Microsoft Office 365 when it was an early prototype.

The one thing we all have in common is an interest in FREE software and we’re using some of the best stuff, regardless of which tools we use with it!

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[blur13Member]

I recently switched from Alpine to Mutt, and I have to say, Mutt is amazing. It takes some effort to set up, at least if you like tinkering with config files until its 100% the way you want it. Its easy to use with gmail. It only uses around 50 MiB of memory. I think that once you discover how powerful Mutt is, you’ll never consider using Thunderbird again.

For google calendar there is gcalcli (its in the repos).

[Brian MasinickModerator]

For people who love light, configurable software you are absolutely correct; mutt is one of the best,

There’s easier, there’s more “powerful”, but even so, mutt can do incredible things as you say!

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[Brian MasinickModerator]

Don’t know about gcalcli.

If it’s really good, tell us about it.

Thanks!

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[blur13Member]

http://github.com/insanum/gcalcli

Its really good in the sense that you can view your calendar, agenda, and add/delete events without having to use a browser. On my slower systems (ie a netbook) it enables the use of google calendar efficiently. Opening up a modern browser, loading google calendar, adding an event, or whatever, takes forever, uses all memory, and has the cpu running at 100%.

Also, you can display your calendar/agenda in Conky.

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