A realization about personal email...

Today, in trying out Evolution on Fedora with Gmail IMAP working, I realized that I REALLY like the threaded view of Gmail's web interface. Now, I know you can customize the view to view emails by subject, etc, and I did that and have been using Outlook 2003 and 2007 with that type of customized view for quite a long time now. The difference between mail clients and the layout in Gmail is that Gmail shows ALL messages belonging to the thread, including all the emails you have sent as well. Evolution and Outlook, to the best of my knowledge, will only ever show you the emails belonging to that thread that reside in the same folder (i.e., not emails you have sent, unless you set it up to save sent messages in the same folder and you are replying from folders other than the Inbox itself... but that's belaboring the point I think, and it's a bit of work too).

So, for now, while I MUST use Outlook for work email, I have never felt the need to use it for personal email and now don't even want to. For calendars, I'm going to start trying out Google Calendar which looks pretty slick. I may even be able to get my wife to use it too since you can sign up for Team Calendars and see each others stuff. Even if you use your own, you can easily share calendars with individuals and can have multiple calendars for personal and shared events. It's pretty slick.

One last thing... it's personal email, not business... so, if it goes down for a while, no biggy! Pickup a book and read. ;-) It's good to unplug every once in a while. If you HAVE to contact somebody, pickup a phone! With that said, I would NEVER entrust an internet service for email and calendaring for my business that relied on internet connectivity. As connected as I am, it's still not 100%... or even 99.9%. ;-) businesses should have applications like these local where they control it's fate. There are plenty of arguments either way, but this is MY opinion.

N800 PIM with google calendar synchronization by erminig

N800 PIM with google calendar synchronization by erminig

This looks promising... but I think the sync is manual.

***Addition***
My post after this talks about just using web clients for email and calendaring... but on devices that may be offline for a large portion of the time, having this content is VERY useful and almost a must (like for having alarms). Google Calendar does however offer SMS alerts for events in your calendar, so even if you are offline, if you have good signal on your phone you can get alerted.

Sync Evolution Calendar with Google Calendar « Ubuntu Blog

Sync Evolution Calendar with Google Calendar « Ubuntu Blog

Possibly a better solution than the previous post since the previous post only deals with reading Google Calendar into Evolution. Especially since I will soon have an N800 and want to be able to just go to Google Calendar to see ALL my events, whether entered in Evolution, Outlook, or straight Google Calendar (or if I check from a PC that isn't mine).

Google Calendar in Evolution « Johnny [Life & Code]

Google Calendar in Evolution « Johnny [Life & Code]

Now that I'm getting back into Linux, there is a LOT I need to learn again. I'm very interested in the ability to sync/open Google Calendar in Evolution, and the fact that Gmail supports IMAP now makes me want to start using this service more! I was leaning, recently, to the Windows Live offerings... and while they work great if you are straight Windows and IE, if you want to use them on any other platform it really isn't that great.

Again, I plan on coming back and giving a review/tips/tricks after checking it out. A friend of mine and I are thinking about taking the "30 days of nothing but Linux" challenge to see if it could be a viable solution for a personal workstation (for us). My fear is that I have too much dependency on Windows centric applications. We shall see.