[Klug-general] Mailreaders, Calendars and so-called Smartphones

[Mike Evans]

OK so here's a summary of what I want:  A calendar shared with my
partner using a GUI client on our Fedora desktop which I can also access
and update from my Android phone.  In addition I'd like email access.

Now the long version:

I used to use Thunderbird as a mail reader. (We have to have a GUI
before the CLI people pipe up.  My partner is a Real Person not a Geek.
I used to use fetchmail to get our email down from our ISP to Linux and
Thunderbird to get it from the mbox.   We also shared  calendars which
was pointed to .ics files  in a shared directory on our machine.

Thunderbird then let us down by hitting a bug whereby it is forever
messing up its index and displaying spurious messages with a date of
1970.  The spurious messages weren't a problem but when I missed some
important emails because it appended them with junk emails and then
automatically removed them I lost my temper.  Out with Thunderbird.

To protect myself others in my immediate proximity I changed to using
IMAP rather than POP at my ISP so that the emails stay there nice and
safely.  I then set up Evolution, which is supposedly nicely integrated
with Gnome.  It was also able to work with the shared .ics files.

Then the arrival last week of said Android phone.  Simplest solution
seemed to be to move the calendar to google.  (Momentary shudder about
selling my soul and making my personal life details available to
google.)  I added a calendar to my google account, created a google
account for my partner, gave each other access to them.  Checked that I
could see them from the phone.  Then set up evolution for each of us to
access the calendars there.  Great.  Then I try to add an event to the
calendar from evolution and get an error message about "No backend
factory for 'google' of 'VEVENT'"  I find various comment on the forums
about google having broken their own API, promises of a fix somewhere
along the line but I've updated and it's not fixed, I've taken the
latest from the updates-testing repo - no better.

Soooo.... which email/calendar client to use and how to share the
calendar data.  Anyone tried WebDAV, CalDAV in combination with Android?

Mike