Upgrading my existing PIMs and Systems: Take 2

As I said last week, Chandler appeared to be a bust.

Over the weekend, I tried out using Thunderbird 2.0 and Lightning and a few plug-ins.

It is definitely far more stable than Chandler. Installation was a breeze. The Thunderbird functionality was rock solid. The Lightning integration was a little less so. Many of my Google calendars did not display all of the events.

I then went on to try Thunderbird 3.0 beta and the corresponding experimental Lightning version. Integration is a little cleaner, some Google events still did not display (though not the same ones) and the application did crash under the 64-bit version of Ubuntu (Jaunty Jackelope) I am running.

So I ended up back using Evolution as my primary PIM. But I did make a few changes in how I used it.

I change the system so that my two Gmail accounts are accessed using IMAP. My Comcast account is accessed using POP , and I am experimenting with using rules tailored for each of the three accounts.

In addition, I have switched over to using "Remember The Milk." (aka RTM) as my primary task manager. Google tasks appears to be of no real use for me since I can't sync my tasks to anything useful.

I use Tasque ( Linux only) to edit and modify my task entries and I use Evolution's read only access of RTM to see the tasks on the fly. It is far from ideal. Far, far, far from ideal. But it is a step up. When Evolution has the ability to access Google Tasks then I may be able to switch to one online provider. Of course, for that to happen Google needs to publish an API that allows us to access the tasks.

- Jim