Aside from plain orneryness, I picked Linux long ago because of KDE, and KDE because of Kontact. And because it was long ago, I still pull my mail off the ISP's server and dump it into a local Maildir folder, my contacts are still in a vCard file, my calendar is still in a vCalendar file.
The "Cascade of Attention-Deficit Teenagers" development process (Google it) made this harder with each KDE release. For a long time I was willing to edit RC files to trick it into using boring text files in my home directory instead of shiny new formats in hidden directories, but the CADT Team finally produced a release where the shiny desktop search daemon rendered the maildir folders unusable if a mail filter tried to move mail out of the inbox. After three rebuilds I gave up and switched to Evolution.
Evolution is mostly adequate, but I just spent 5 hours composing a carefully argued response to a proposal, and Evolution threw it away when I tried to apply the TT style to a word in a bulleted list.
So, it you wanted PIM functions on an Ubuntu 17.10 laptop, and you wanted to keep your files locally, and you wanted to know where all the relevant files were so you could back them up, what would you use?
Have you tried Thunderbird? As I have drunken the cloud kool-aid I have not used it to store my mail files locally. AFAIK it can and does so reasonably well.
On December 22, 2017 5:49:58 PM CST, Glen Ditchfield GJDitchfield@acm.org wrote:
On 2017-12-22 Glen Ditchfield wrote:
[...]
With almost everything you can still use Maildir, but instead of the MUA (PIM) accessing Maildir directly, have your Ubuntu run dovecot to serve the Maildir up as IMAP. Any of your MUA choices will support IMAP, and your data is still local, you just access it through IMAP instead of direct file access.
However, it's still just files so you still know where they are, still control them, can still grep on them, index them, etc. Just never write to them or modify the files or dovecot/IMAP get very confused. (Manual deletions are fine.)
That's what I do. Works great. As a bonus, you can have your phone, tablets, etc., access them too (but setup SSL if you're going to do that).
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Bradford C Vokey -
Glen Ditchfield -
Trevor Cordes