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Decent alternatives to Outlook

I've been trying to find a replacement for Microsoft Outlook. Despite all its bulk and penchants for getting infected with viruses (from way back I should say), I do miss using Outlook. I just don't feel like paying for it nor do I need all of its diverse features. 

So, I am looking for alternatives to Outlook. I tried Microsoft Mail and it was actually quite decent. I also tried Thunderbird and while I am not a huge fan of its mickey-mouse icons, I don't mind it either. If only Thunderbird had the polish that Firefox has. 

I heard from people that Entourage sucked. Its not like I have a mac, but while doing research on this subject I ran across that. 

So far, I have the mail part covered. I find it weird that despite using IMAP, my client only gets mail every so often (by default one of them was set to retrieve mail every 30 minutes!), but I was able to configure it to grab mail every minute. The parts I am having trouble with though are the calendar and the directory lookup (where you look up emails of people using some kind of search mechanism). 

I didn't realise how import the calendar was until I missed a few appointments. Normally, with Outlook, the reminder thing pops up and annoys the heck out of you, so you deal with it. Not so with webmail. You just get a popup and tend to forget it exists. Not to mention that the window doesn't repeatedly annoy you to deal with it. Sometimes, it is good to have something nag you.

I am trying to talk to a Kerio Connect mail server in case anyone is wondering. Since I couldn't figure out a way to get Windows Mail to sync calendars, I decided to stick with Thunderbird. Turns out that if I use the Lightning plug-in with Thunderbird that it can at least sync the calendar in a read-only format. I find it clunky, but at least I can see my calendar entries on the desktop now. I still find the whole Thunderbird thing odd though. It was reminding me of things from Wednesday to Friday. I am not sure why I need to be reminded of something that far out in the future especially if the reminder in the calendar is set to 15 minutes. And I am not sure what will happen if I dismiss them (my guess is, they will get dismissed). I am not sure where the issue lies, whether it is Kerio or whether it is Lightning/Thunderbird or some configuration somewhere in between but Kerio Connect doesn't seem to have a solution that works for me. Sigh.

Oh well. On the bright side, at least I get access to my calendar through Thunderbird. I just have to log into the web interface to create new calendar entries. I was also able to get Thunderbird talk to the LDAP server to do lookups, but I think that misses out on group email addresses. And I had to make lots of guesses to get it to work. Still, I suppose that is progress. The thing that annoys me is that Outlook just works with this out of the box. There is a Kerio Connect connector for Outlook and voila, everything just works. I'm not even going to bother trying to connect my BlackBerry to anything :).

If only the good folks who volunteer their time on Mozilla's Firefox would give Thunderbird some love... that might actually give Outlook a run for its money. I guess it is open source and anyone can contribute (hmmm I wonder if I could...). Until recently, I had written off desktop clients for e-mail. I greatly appreciate my Gmail account. But, I think there needs to be something more than an email in one of the many dozen tabs I have (some of which are hidden by the Panorama feature, one of my favourite Firefox 4 features).

So, has anyone else has success, luck etc with replacing Outlook? I am tempted to try using Evolution for Windows, but I suspect I will not get any further than I did with Thunderbird.
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Johnnie Francis Xavier MacIntyre said…
I was able to fix my calendar issue somewhat so that it works correctly now via Thunderbird. In Kerio webmail, there is a little icon that gives you a personalised URL to your calendar. While it is in beta, the CalDEV thing works for read and writing calendars. More importantly, it works. And I can dismiss notifications. I still have issues with LDAP, but that might be due to me not knowing the correct servers etc (it looks it up, just gives me the wrong email address).
12:14 pm
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