Looking for an alternative: mail & calendar

Barghest · 2009-06-17 14:06:05

Hi,

at work everyone has its appointments in a calendar file (.ics) that is stored on a webserver and that is accessible via ftp.

The Mac users have these calendars available through iCal. I'm currently using thunderbird+lightning to load and edit the calendar files.

Since this solution works I find thunderbird is very slow (both starting and switching between the mail and calendar view) so that I'm looking for an alternative.

I looked at evolution but it only allows reading the ics file via webcal://path/to/calendar.ics (I need writing access via ftp://user:passwrd@path/to/calendar.ics)

I also tried calcurse but it doesn't support ftp import/export as well.

So, do you have any suggestions? What I prefer is an integrated solution but if there are two different apps for the task AND they're light (maybe command line tools (mutt or cone for mails?)) I can switch to them.

Thanks in advance

barghest

Last edited by Barghest (2009-06-17 14:06:16)

jordz · 2009-06-17 14:12:01

Maybe an option to mount the ftp?

Barghest · 2009-06-17 14:46:03

Hmm..never thought of that.

Do you mean to use something like curlftpfs to mount the ftp-files (I only need two of them, the others are fine with webcal since I don't want to write on them)?

brisbin33 · 2009-06-17 14:47:35

i believe there are .ics conversion scripts for both calcurse and remind+wyrd... you could put that in a cron job and then use mutt for mails.

syntobu · 2009-06-17 20:50:28

I believe there is a fuse module that allows for mounting ftp, also you might look into using rainlendar, very light and handles ics files.

whoops · 2009-06-17 21:03:34

Isn't there a claws-mail plugin for that .ics Stuff? I'm not sure about that, but compared to evolution claws-mail is pretty fast. And last time I used thunderbird, it was pretty slow compared to evolution.

edit: as for CLI-tools: I like using claws-mail as main mail program because it works great even while sharing it's mail folder with other ("non-egocentric") tools. P.e. I had a cronjob for a while to wget sites without rss support into the mailfolders etc. And when my server's pop3 didn't work during early Debian Lenny/"stable", I just ssh-mounted the mails.

Last edited by whoops (2009-06-17 21:11:14)

JackH79 · 2009-06-18 06:23:12

Well, might be a useless suggestion, but since the switch from calendar to mail within thunderbird is your biggest problem, why not use thunderbird + sunbird (the standalone version of lightning) instead? I do for the same reason. Works brilliantly.

anrxc · 2009-06-18 14:54:25

Barghest wrote:

So, do you have any suggestions? What I prefer is an integrated solution but if there are two different apps for the task AND they're light (maybe command line tools (mutt or cone for mails?)) I can switch to them.

Emacs and org-mode would be a good solution. Org-mode is used for everything from keeping notes and todo items to project planing and publishing web sites. It can export back to ics and with Emacs tramp you can edit files directly on remote systems over ssh or ftp. Both org-mode and tramp ar a part of the Emacs distribution.

zenlord · 2009-06-19 14:57:50

I'm having similar problems and I found it very hard to find a decently working solution.

I used your setup until 1 month ago, and had the location of our .ics-files mounted with NFS - worked very well, but I could not make any appointments for my colleagues. Evolution did a good job, but it is bloated.

So I switched to caldav (davical PHP+postgres) only to see that evolution-data-server has some giant memory leaks when connected to a caldav-server. These leaks are solved in the current version, but at the office we're using Debian stable, and thus we're stuck with v2.22.

I tried Thunderbird and lightning, but lightning:
1. handled the three caldav-accounts not that elegantly: all reminders of the past three years popped up one by one -> 2 hours of clicking, just for one client...
2. didn't even show all the appointments -> this is just plain dangerous for a business...

I tried Chandler, but chandler did not succeed in importing my calendars. I kept getting other error messages - the program itself looked rather well and I liked the proprietary interface / view.

I have since setup some web-apps (IlohaMail for mail, Contagged for contacts), but have not found anything readymade to connect to a caldav-calendar.

That's why I'm contemplating to give Scalable OGO a try - the only downside is that there are no official packages for Arch / Debian...

So back to Evolution. I will test the upgrade to Debian Squeeze @ the office, since Evolution looks to be our only short-term option at the moment.

Zl.

Barghest · 2010-02-26 10:30:12

Digging out my own thread since I have some time to spend

The switch to CL/ncurses programms still fails due to a solution for the calender app.

Yes, in calcurse I can import the ics files from the ftp server via mounting it. But there are some problems:
- As you know each member has his own ics file for its appointements. So these files need to be imported quite frequently so that I get all the changes. Importing an ics file again means doubled/trippled... entries

- There are to ics files I also need to edit (for the others reading is all I need): my ics file and one for appointements for the whole workgroup. But exporting from calcurse to an ics files results in one file that contains all appointements (mine and the ones I imported from the other files)

Any further ideas or suggestions. I didn't take a look at emacs + org-mode because I never used emac at all ;b

Thanks in advance

Barghest

Ashren · 2010-02-26 11:07:27

Barghest: Have you considered setting up webcalendar? Here you can create profiles for each user/department and import/export ics files. It seems quite flexible and I'm planning to use it for our department.

I have it set up on LAMP server, but it might be possible to use with other lighter setups.

Barghest · 2010-02-26 12:55:07

I guess setting up a completely new environment won't come into question for my colleagues (darn inflexible Windows users ;b )

skanky · 2010-02-26 13:28:24

If your events, after import, are single line entries, then it could be possible to remove duplicates as part of the import process. For example, remind entries are normally single line (unless they're complicated repeating items), so if you used one of the ical2rem scripts say, you could pipe the output to import.rem and then process that to remove duplicates.

Going the other way, as remind has (can have) multiple event files, you can have two files in remind that get converted to different ics files.

See http://wiki.43folders.com/index.php/Remind_Helpers

Note you'll need to search for cal2rem as the link at the wiki's broken. There are more than one out there (at least a perl and a ruby one).

The same might be possible with other calendars (eg pal).

Arch Linux

#1 2009-06-17 14:06:05

Looking for an alternative: mail & calendar

#2 2009-06-17 14:12:01

Re: Looking for an alternative: mail & calendar

#3 2009-06-17 14:46:03

Re: Looking for an alternative: mail & calendar

#4 2009-06-17 14:47:35

Re: Looking for an alternative: mail & calendar

#5 2009-06-17 20:50:28

Re: Looking for an alternative: mail & calendar

#6 2009-06-17 21:03:34

Re: Looking for an alternative: mail & calendar

#7 2009-06-18 06:23:12

Re: Looking for an alternative: mail & calendar

#8 2009-06-18 14:54:25

Re: Looking for an alternative: mail & calendar

#9 2009-06-19 14:57:50

Re: Looking for an alternative: mail & calendar

#10 2010-02-26 10:30:12

Re: Looking for an alternative: mail & calendar

#11 2010-02-26 11:07:27

Re: Looking for an alternative: mail & calendar

#12 2010-02-26 12:55:07

Re: Looking for an alternative: mail & calendar

#13 2010-02-26 13:28:24

Re: Looking for an alternative: mail & calendar

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