What PIM Suite/Email client do you recommend?

[Snowhog]

I retired in 2008 to become a Bass fishing bum with my grandsons!

So one could say that you retired to "sit on my ass and fish for bass."

[GreyGeek]

Eggsakly!!!

My youngest grandson (14) and I went Bass fishing yesterday at a lake a couple blocks away and he promptly landed a 6-8 lb catfish, and a 12" Bass.

[Chopstick]

Thanks for your comprehensive demonstration of your backup process, btw. So far I didn't use anything particularly sophisticated. I used Unison for a while, but recently I actually haven't had a good backup strategy. My home office really needs some work! (Of course my work is always backed up on GitHub, so it just wasn't that critical.)

One question I had about this whole btrfs thing is, how does it interact with full disk encryption? I like to have that on my laptop, in case it gets lost, because I also have confidential business stuff on it. Would that interfere with the incremental backups?
Other than that, I think I am pretty much ready to try it.

I'm now creating a bootable flash drive and will try the 20.04 alpha tomorrow!

[GreyGeek]

https://btrfs.wiki.kernel.org/index...._encryption.3F

[Chopstick]

Thanks, that answers my question:

Btrfs works safely with partition encryption (luks/dm-crypt) since Linux 3.2.

[woodsmoke]

Hi
If your work is going to go to "two part authentication",. this new stuff is different from what Gmail tried to force on us a few years ago, because of the whole malware thing...

I do not know of any of the e-mail clients that will do SOME of the new "two step" authentication.

HOWEVER, if your business is using MS Cloud e-mail client and does not use two step authentication then MS cloud e-mail is just typing in the particular cloud URL etc. NOT the recommended steps about outgoing, incoming yada...

You WILL need to get the URL etc. security stuff like STARTTLS or START or whatever from your work and it should go fine.

woodsmoke

[Chopstick]

I use two-factor authentication with my Google account, but our M$ Office365 system does not use two-factor authentication.
Email from our M$ account works with IMAP in KMail, but nothing else works.

I was also able to get Gmail to work with IMAP *and* two-factor authentication in KMail, and the process should be the same for Evolution, however, that does not work for the calendar, and apparently Google will start blocking Gmail for KMail as well starting in June. (Google apparently considers KMail unsafe.)
The way to get Gmail to work with two-factor authentication is to generate an app password in the web interface of your Google account and then use that instead of your login password. The app password has 16 digits, is random, and by-passes the two-factor authentication. As I said, this currently still works with IMAP and KMail, but does not work with the Google Calendar and KOrganizer.

[woodsmoke]

Chopstick
thanks for the information, I will try that!
woodsmoke

[Chopstick]

Hi Folks,
I thought I should follow up and let everyone know what I decided to to and what my experience so far is.

So, I decided to wipe my drive and install kubuntu 20.04. Overall I am quite happy with this, but I still have some issue. I opted for full disk encryption and a btrfs file system (following GreyGeek's recommendation). Start-up time is not that fast and mounting of the encrypted LUKS partition does not work without manual intervention (with initramfs). More to that in a separate post).

Now to the PIM suite: I installed Evolution and set up my email accounts and calendars. Google accounts was super easy, also with 2-factor authentication and email and calendar work like a charm with full functionality! M$ Exchange was a bit more complicated, because you have to add explicit permissions for Evolution in this M$ Active Directory thing on Azure (which I do not fully understand, but I followed a guide and it worked flawlessly). So, both, Google and M$ Exchange accounts work and have full functionality in Evolution, which is pretty amazing and more than I expected! Needless to say, setting up my university IMAP accounts was a breeze (except SMTP for one, which I don't use anyway).

[Chopstick]

Evolution/Exchange setup

For the benefit of people reading this later, I should also add that while setting up the Google account was completely straight forward and intuitive, setting up the M$ Exchange account was a lengthy and somewhat complicated process.

First you need to install the evolution-ews package from your package manager.
For the setup within Evolution I used this guide (PDF), which has pretty pictures and is very easy to follow:
https://carleton.ca/its/duo/wp-conte...lution-EWS.pdf
This guide assumes that you have a "Tenant ID" and and "App ID"; if you work in a larger company with a competent IT department, they probably already have this set up or they can do it for you. However, if you work in a small company and are one of only a few Linux users, you may have to do it yourself.

Both, the Tenant and App ID's, are from Microsoft's Active Directory on Azure. The Tenant ID is associated with your work group or organization on Azure, while the App ID is basically a suite of permissions associated with a client app for Azure web services (as far as I understand...).
To set this up I found this guide very helpful:
https://wiki.gnome.org/Apps/Evolution/EWS/OAuth2
Some of the GUI elements on Azure Active Directory have changed slightly and I had to use the search function to find the permissions element in section 6.c.iii, but overall it was not too difficult. After you have the Tenant and App ID, you can set up Evolution and at least for me everything works now!

[Beerislife]

I'd always been a bit of a distro hopper until I settled on KDE Neon, so Thunderbird has always been my preferred mail client. I have Provider for Google Calendar installed for bi-directional access to my Google Calendar. It requires the Lightning plugin.

https://addons.thunderbird.net/en-GB...ogle-calendar/