Long time no post. Yeah. Let’s just say that it’s sum­mer, the weather is fine and I don’t wanna spend more time in front of my PC than nec­es­sary. Besides, I had some busi­ness to take care of. Any­way, a few peo­ple asked me to return to writ­ing more reg­u­larly. I picked a topic that has really vexed me over the last few days: Cal­en­dars and MUAs (Mail User Agents, com­monly referred to as mail clients).

I’m cur­rently using Out­look XP and I wanted to change some­thing. Frankly, Outlook’s IMAP sup­port sucks and it’s really bloated. All I wanted was a well per­form­ing MUA that sup­ports IMAP. After I did a lit­tle research I found that Sylpheed exactly fits my needs. It’s small, it’s fast, it doesn’t need much mem­ory, and it sup­ports IMAP. Unfor­tu­nately, Sylpheed doesn’t sport a cal­en­dar. That can’t be much of a prob­lem, I though. Lit­tle did I know that look­ing for a cal­en­dar appli­ca­tion would eat up a lot of my spare time.

I dis­cov­ered some PIM (Per­sonal Infor­ma­tion Man­age­ment) soft­ware that would fit my needs but almost every appli­ca­tion had a major draw­back. First of all, I didn’t want to pay for it. Oth­er­wise, Essen­tialPIM would’ve been my first choice, even though they charge you twice: Once for the Pro appli­ca­tion and once for the plu­gin needed to sync with my Google cal­en­dars. Well, I took a look at the Chan­dler Project but that has a lot more to offer than I want. Next, I tried Mozilla Sun­bird. In com­bi­na­tion with the Provider for Google Cal­en­dar 0.4 exten­sion it did actu­ally work. After some exten­sive test­ing I real­ized two things. First, the exten­sion didn’t always work sat­is­fac­to­rily and Sun­bird has a mem­ory foot­print of about 35 MB.

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