The Open Source alternative to Outlook

Posted @ 11:45PM

Categories: Tools

Tags: Tools

Perhaps your like me and your work email goes through Microsoft Exchange which rather forces you into Outlook as the default Windows client unless your IT department has the where-with-all to provide IMAP support. When it comes to Outlook personally, I fit well within the 20% of the 80/20 rule. While it's far more than I need at the same time it's lacking things like basic NNTP support. I'm not a manager and I don't need a "cockpit" view for managing communications, people and resources. What I prefer is the following in one app:

Email (IMAP and POP)
NNTP newsgroup access
RSS access
Calendaring for the few meetings I have each week and the spurious all hands meetings

The first three come with Mozilla's Thunderbird 2.0 and the last bullet item you can get with two add-ons, namely Lightning and Provider for Google Calendar. These last two allow me to easily synchronize my work (read Outlook) calendar with Google which means I can access my calendar from any browser as well as receive notifications on my cell phone for meetings, all for free.

Comments [3]

permalink

Thursday, July 12, 2007 7:05:15 PM (Pacific Daylight Time, UTC-07:00)

Having heard a lot of ranting and raving from the linux evangalists, I am trying out Evolution for Windows

http://sourceforge.net/project/showfiles.php?group_id=159440&package_id=194380&release_id=492523

Richard Scoop

Monday, November 17, 2008 6:17:34 PM (Pacific Standard Time, UTC-08:00)

Great tips. Now though, I am not sure if I should go all out with Tbird or try out Evolution. I can't do both, that's for sure and since I have been using Outlook for over 10 years to manage my email contacts and calendar I am already a bit fretful.

However, Outlook has to go. Lately it has been an absolute pain to deal with. Crashes all the time or just freezes for a good 10 minutes for no reason. Half of the features that make outlook nice to have don't work (auto work correction) reliably and plugins seem to crash it even more. Signatures are a mess to work with, and I could go on all day.

Tbird is attractive to me because as a web developer I already use Firefox for most of my work. But evolution also looks good because of the integration between the mail and calendar (whereas in Tbird it's sort of a patchwork).

My last reason ot stick with Outlook just went out the window as my cellphone, made by Samsung, does not sync with Outlook (even though Samsung has an app to do that. They just figured they should not make their smartphones work with it).

In any case, thank you for the tiop. I am moving my emails over to Tbird now. It's taking a bit..........

conticreative

Tuesday, November 18, 2008 4:41:59 PM (Pacific Standard Time, UTC-08:00)

Be sure to take a look at Seek. I've just started playing with it but it looks very promising.

Steve Trefethen

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