[RndTbl] Desktop PIM/mail programs

Trevor Cordes trevor at tecnopolis.ca
Fri Dec 22 21:57:26 CST 2017


On 2017-12-22 Glen Ditchfield wrote:
> 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.  
[...]
> 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?

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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