What PIM Suite/Email client do you recommend?

[Chopstick]

Hi Folks,
I am wondering what open-source PIM suite I should choose to replace Kontact/KMail.

I have been using Kontact for a long time, but recently I have been having more and more issues, first with M$ Exchange accounts (that was not an issue before I started working in a Windows-dominated environment) and now with my Google account. I was able to set up IMAP email from my M$ Exchange account and after some trouble also from Google/Gmail, but the Calendars appear to be hopeless.

I let this slide for a good while, but now that I am working from home (for obvious reasons...), the limitations of Kontact become painfully evident and I really need to do something about it. For example I recently missed a conference call, because Kontact/KMail did not display the time zone in an Outlook Calendar Invite correctly.

So, I am now shopping around for a good open-source solution that will run on my kubuntu box (16.04) and can handle Google accounts (email and calendar - that is a must) and ideally also plays nice with M$ Office/Exchange.
I've heard good things about Evolution in this regard.

Any opinions/recommendations? What do you use, and do you like it?

Thanks!

[GreyGeek]

When my iPhone6+ bellied up with Apple's "Touch Disease" (their euphemism for poor engineering) rather than pay $600 for a "repaired" (i.e. used) iPhone 6+ I decided to try Android and bought an unlocked Redmi Note 7 from Amazon for $185. Awesome phone! I installed the "Calendar App - Calendar 2019, Reminder, ToDos" from "Useful Handy Apps". I synced it with my Google email account and activated the Google calendar on my Chromium browser, along with Drive, Contacts, Photos, Duo (for facetime to iPhones also), sheets, slides, Hangouts, and more. On my Kubuntu 20.04 I connect to my ISP email service using IMAP on Thunderbird. The GMail app installed on my phone allows me to connect to both my GMail and my ISP mail with the GMail. I switch between them by touching my face icon. And, things work equally well with my FireFox browser.

[Chopstick]

Thanks for your response! I should probably add that I am specifically looking for a desktop application. On my phone everything except the M$ Exchange calendar from my work is working; the M$ calendar is read-only, which I can live with, since I mainly edited my calendar in the office - until now that is! No I need a PIM suite where I can edit my Exchange calendar. Google stuff works smoothly on my phone, which is a Fairphone 2 with LinageOS installed; I have very limited google service installed - mainly the PlayStore and location services, which I usually switch off. Overall I'm very happy with my phone! - But not with my current desktop setup (which is actually a Thinkpad with external monitor and keyboard).

[GreyGeek]

The pickings are slim....
https://www.linuxlinks.com/pim/

Evolution	Integrated mail, addressbook and calendaring functionality
Kontact	Unites mature and proven applications
Lightning	Adds calendar and scheduling functionality to the Mozilla Thunderbird
Org mode	Mode for the Emacs text editor
Makagiga	To-do manager, RSS reader, notepad, widgets, image viewer
Osmo	Personal organizer, which includes calendar, task manager and address book modules
TreeLine	Stores almost any kind of information
qOrganizer	A general organizer

[GreyGeek]

Just for grins and giggles I added Lightening to my Thunderbird Mail. Works nice for me but I don't know if it would fit your needs.

[Chopstick]

I used to use Thunderbird+Lightning 15 years ago, when I was still on Windows and just getting interested in open-source. It worked fine for me, but I was a student then. Thanks for the list above - I will take a look at it.
I have a feeling the main contenders will be Thunderbird+Lightning and Evolution. From your experience, do you know how Thunderbird+Lightning works with Google and M$ accounts?

[Chopstick]

I used to use Thunderbird+Lightning 15 years ago, when I was still on Windows and just getting interested in open-source. It worked fine for me, but I was a student then. Thanks for the list above - I will take a look at it.
I have a feeling the main contenders will be Thunderbird+Lightning and Evolution. From your experience, do you know how Thunderbird+Lightning works with Google and M$ accounts?

[GreyGeek]

I have Lightening installed and when I make an entry into Lightning's calendar on Thunderbird it appears on the Calendar on my Google account. But, it's free and easy to use. If it will be satisfactory for your use case depends entirely on your use case.

[Chopstick]

Good to know that Google accounts work - Thanks!

[Chopstick]

Btw. GreyGeek, you mentioned you are using kubuntu 20.04 - is that a beta release? how is that working out for you? I was going to upgrade to 20.04 in April with the official release.

[GreyGeek]

Btw. GreyGeek, you mentioned you are using kubuntu 20.04 - is that a beta release? how is that working out for you? I was going to upgrade to 20.04 in April with the official release.

Since I began using Kubuntu in January of 2009, I've always installed the alpha version sometime in Jan or early Feb. I installed the alpha release of Kubuntu in 2009, 2010, 2011 and in 2012 I isntalled the 12.04 LTS alpha and have been using the LTS releases every since. I replaced the 18.04 with the 20.04 in the 2nd or 3rd week in January, with BTRFS as my root filesystem. I've been using BTRFS since 16.04.

I bought this laptop new in 2012. Since 12.04 I have never had any of my Kubuntu systems crash. On rare occasions I've had an app lock up, which forced me to use the skull&crossbones. And, I've had an app or two just stop working, which is why I switched from KMail to Thunderbird. KMail couldn't handle the IMAP structure of my fiber optic ISP mail server.

My Nvidia GT 650M GPU works great. I run Steam apps without ANY problems (Universal Sandbox^2, Kerbal Space Program, Turbo2, and a couple others), And under WINE I run SpaceEngine-.98.exe and a heart monitoring program written for Windows. I used to keep a PCL development tool for XP on my system to support the ag engineer who developed a tractor. The software I wrote controlled the tractor based on driver inputs. Not all of my attempts to install Windows apps works, however. Minecraft and MultiMC both run great. I have a Watcom table, which runs great, but I rarely use it. I recently got into SDR, and use it to listen to the world of shortwave.

All of this and more is on my 20.04 installation, and it is all rock solid. I reach a desktop in 11 seconds from POST.

$ systemd-analyze
Startup finished in 3.023s (kernel) + 8.287s (userspace) = 11.311s
graphical.target reached after 8.275s in userspace

I have my calendars between Google and my Samsung GS(10) updating my Lightening Thunderbird calendar and visa-versa. Using KConnect I can ping my phone to locate it. I can cast videos to my 20.04 from my phone. From my FireFox browser I up and download files to my Google Drive. I've never been hacked in the 22 years I've used Linux or the 10 years I've used Kubuntu.

20.04 has Plasma 5.18.3, which is fast and light footed, so, why wait?

[Chopstick]

Funny: I also started with kubuntu in January 2009, but for me it was the first jump into the Linux world. I think since 12.04 I have only been using the LTS, because I found I often had to reconfigure my desktop and customized settings after updates, which is time-consuming, and I have other things to worry about, too. And after I finished grad school I got even tardier with upgrades (hence my out-dated system).

Your experience with 20.04 sounds pretty encouraging! Maybe I will upgrade before the official release. Did you do a clean install? With my old version (16.04), should I do that? It's kind of a hassle...
Along these lines, is there a particular reason you are using btrfs? I have ext4, and I don't really want to reformat my HD...

In terms of PIM suite, after much research, I think I will probably give Evolution a shot. It seems to be the most "business ready", as in, compatible with M$ products and protocols.

[GreyGeek]

Funny: I also started with kubuntu in January 2009, but for me it was the first jump into the Linux world. I think since 12.04 I have only been using the LTS, because I found I often had to reconfigure my desktop and customized settings after updates, which is time-consuming, and I have other things to worry about, too. And after I finished grad school I got even tardier with upgrades (hence my out-dated system).

As an old college prof I am curious as to your field of study in grad school

Your experience with 20.04 sounds pretty encouraging! Maybe I will upgrade before the official release. Did you do a clean install? With my old version (16.04), should I do that? It's kind of a hassle...
Along these lines, is there a particular reason you are using btrfs? I have ext4, and I don't really want to reformat my HD...
...

Since the EOL for 19.10 is only FOUR months away, I recommend 20.04 and I also recommend a CLEAN install. The EOL for 20.04 is April 2025 (but Canonical support ends at April 2023). You cannot do an upgrade from 16.04 to 20.04 directly without going through the in between LTS's, if I understand that upgrade process correctly, and it takes only about 15 minutes to do a bare metal install, AFTER you make appropriate backups of all your data. I understand that re-installing your favorite software and settings can take another 2-8 hours or so. Also, IF you do a clean install, and use BTRFS as your root filesystem, the reformatting time is negligible, especially compared to all the time you'll save in the future making snapshots of your system and incremental backups to remote storage devices. Snapshots take a second, literally. And incremental backups take less than 3 minutes per 100Gb of data, in my experience. BTRFS won't be beneficial if you are using lots of databases that involve dynamically expanding and shrinking db file structures, like virtual drives for VB, or PostgreSQL db's, etc... In that case I'd stay with EXT4 and use TimeShift for backing up.

[Chopstick]

I think you are right about the upgrade sequence, so that settles it - I need to do a clean install. And since I am already at it, I also want to resize my boot partition and then I can also look at btrfs. First, however, I should get a larger backup HD.
I don't use databases on my home partition; all my data for work is on separate data drives. The format we use is NetCDF4 or HDF5, which can grow dynamically, but this is not common.
These are formats, which are highly structured and very common in earth sciences and climate modelling. Which also nicely brings me to my grad studies: technically physics, but what I actually did was climate modelling, which is basically high-performance computing based on computational fluid dynamics and a lot of statistical analysis of very large datasets. Now, in the private sector, I mainly do modelling of climate change impacts on water resources but still some regional climate modelling as well.
If anybody has any questions about climate or climate change, I am happy to help.
What was/is your field, GreyGeek?

[GreyGeek]

Assoc Prof of Physics, Math, Biochemistry and two other fields. I was a professional student. (I miss grad school and its environment of pure investigation and discovery)
I taught for almost 20 years and then started my own computer and criminal forensics business, mostly writing business applications and working on murder investigations. I retired in 2008 to become a Bass fishing bum with my grandsons!

I think you'll find the use of BTRFS very rewarding in terms of backing up and rolling back.
Here is what I usually do, taken from my history command:

sudo -i
mount /dev/disk/by-uuid/ce2b5741-c01e-4b3d-b6ba-401ad7f7fcdf /mnt

(that uses the uuid of my sda1 partition. Use blkid to find your uuid's.

btrfs su snapshot -r /mnt/@ /mnt/snapshots/@20200327
btrfs su snapshot -r /mnt/@home /mnt/snapshots/@home20200327
Those two command create a snapshot pair linked by date. The "-r" parameter makes the snapshot read only.

Notice: ALL of the above can be done without taking your system offline. All apps can continue to run, printers print, etc... The only exception to that is if you do a rollback and reboot.

Sometime in the future I can rollback to the @20200327 and @home20200327 snapshots, making them @ and @home, by using:

mv /mnt/@ /mnt/@old
mv /mnt/@home /mnt/@homeold
btrfs su snapshot /mnt/snapshots/@20200327 /mnt/@
btrfs su snapshot /mnt/snapshots/@home20200327 /mnt/@home

(Notice that the "-r" parameter is not used, making the new @ and @home rw.)
umount /mnt
exit
reboot.


Note that you cannot use mv to move snapshots between btrfs subvolumes on two different storage devices.

After the bootup completes I open a console sudo -i to root, mount /mnt as before, and issue
btrfs su delete -C /mnt/snapshots/@old
sync
btrfs su delete -C /mnt/snapshots/@homeold
sync

Sync enforces the commit. The command fstrim (mainly for SSD's) is set up automatically if systemd detects an SSD during the distro install so you don't have to worry about using that command. Using it too much can shorten the life of an SSD. Systemd uses it about once a month.

The first time I do a backup to a remote device, mounted as /backup, I first send an entire set:
mount /dev/disk/by-uuid/17f4fe91-5cbc-46f6-9577-10aa173ac5f6 /backup (3rd HD on my laptop)
btrfs send /mnt/snapshots/@2020326 | btrfs receive /backup
btrfs send /mnt/snapshots/@home20200326 | btrfs receive /backup
Since my system is about 100Gb it will take about 5-10 minutes to send @2020... and 10-15 to send @home2020....
That pair establishes my base pair.

From now on I just send increments following the making of each snapshot pair.
btrfs send -p /mnt/snapshots/@20200326 /mnt/snapshots/@20200327 | btrfs receive /backup/snapshots
btrfs send -p /mnt/snapshots/@home20200326 /mnt/snapshots/@home20200327 | btrfs receive /backup/snapshots

"-p" is the partial backup parameter. The receive part of the command uses the previously sent 20200326 pair and adds what the send part sends, which is only the difference between the snapshot on the 26th and that of the 27th. This means that it usually, on my system, takes less than a minute to send @2020... and a little more than a minute to send @home2020....

The btrfs send has an "-F" parameter that sends the snapshot as an ASCII stream and it is saved at the receive end into a text file. That is used when the remote system isn't formatted with btrfs. The destination and the source locations can be reversed in the send command to fetch remotely stored snapshots.

I do this manually in a Konsole using history to recover previously used commands. It usually doesn't take more than a couple minutes to make both snapshots. One can use TimeShift as a gui to btrfs but there are two major differences: first, the snapshots are stored within the @ system. Secondly, if you unistall TimeShift without deleted all the snapshots made by it before doing so, your system will be corrupted and you'll have to recover manually using snapshots from a remote device.

About <ROOT_FS>: when you install BTRFS you can access the root fs by mounting the partition it is residing on to a location under root "/". I use /mnt. When I used the command
mount /dev/disk/by-uuid/ce2b5741-c01e-4b3d-b6ba-401ad7f7fcdf /mnt
I am actually mounting the <ROOT_FS> to /mnt. When you list the directory of /mnt you will see
@
@home
and a normal directory I made using mkdir /mnt/snapshots. Any thing I save on /mnt or /mnt/snapshot (file, subvolume, what ever, is OUTSIDE the system, i.e., it is outside @ and @home.
I can create a subvolume, say @data at /mnt/@data, and mount it as /home/jerry/data in /etc/fstab during boot. Just like @ and @home, I can make dated snapshots of @data in /mnt/snapshots independent of @ or @home, IF the stuff in @data is truely independent of either @ or @home.

That's just an inkling of why I use BTRFS.