Brain Assassin

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.

35 MB isn’t all that much you think? If you employ Mozilla Thun­der­bird, you can install the Light­ning add-​​on and the Provider for Google Cal­en­dar 0.4. That com­bi­na­tion will actu­ally use up 10 to 15 MB more mem­ory than Sun­bird. Sylpheed needs about 20 MB on aver­age. OK, time to switch to Thun­der­bird with the Light­ning add-​​on. It con­sumes roughly the same amount of mem­ory Sun­bird and Sylpheed do com­bined. That move almost fixed all my needs. Still, Thun­der­bird wouldn’t always sync with my Google cal­en­dars and I haven’t been able to find out why. I addressed this last issue by dis­abling the Google Provider exten­sion. Instead, I installed the lat­est ver­sion of GCAL­Dae­mon which does a much bet­ter job. In two days it hasn’t failed me once.

Of course, Thun­der­bird doesn’t start up as fast as Sylpheed does. Sylpheed is about four to five times faster than Thun­der­bird. Sun­bird isn’t exactly the speed­i­est pro­gramm either, so that doesn’t really mat­ter. Cur­rently I’m doing fine with mul­ti­ple Google cal­en­dars and Thun­der­bird as a MUA. As an added bonus there are a few nice exten­sions avail­able for Thun­der­bird. Dur­ing the course of my tests, six exten­sions (Dis­play Mail User Agent, Head­er­Scroll, Light­ning, Maxmize Mes­sage Pane, Update Noti­fier, View Head­ers Tog­gle But­ton) were active.