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

[Colin McCarthy]

I just use Google at home, at work, and errr at play :)  Wife (a similar
real person not a geek) copes very well with Google and an Android phone
with shared calendars.
Using a traditional fat client application in this day and age is extremely
outdated.  Embrace the cloud and the browser.

Colin


On 31 July 2012 16:47, Mike Evans <mike at tandem.f9.co.uk> wrote:

> 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
>
>
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