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Comment by cs702 | Hacker News Reader

Former Thunderbird user here.

I'm shocked that there's no mention of the need for reliable out-of-the-box synchronization with online calendars and contacts. (At one point, I tried all the available Thunderbird add-ons for syncing with Google's apps; none worked well for me.)

Even better than synchronization, I would love to have an alternative to existing online email/calendar/contact services.

If Mozilla were ever to offer its own paid email, calendar, and contacts subscription service, powered by open-source code, and backed with strong customer/data/privacy protections, I would sign up in a heartbeat.

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I've spent a lot of time looking into this and am as frustrated as you. I'm building out a small consulting company based on Linux, and the basis of it all - email, contacts, calendars - is a fiasco. I went to Evolution as a client, which handles all of the above. Thunderbird does mail but its contact solutions require LDAP, not CardDav and its calendar solutions are bolted on, not integral. Linux devs spent a lot of time working on the "replacement for Outlook" in the early 2000s before giving up and spending their energy blowing up Gnome2's otherwise-perfectly functioning DE instead. My two go-to solutions on Linux desktops are Evolution, as mentioned, and the web client for Fastmail, which offers email, calendaring and contact sharing. Thunderbird is behind. There's a recent new add-on that purports to deal with carddav and caldav in Thunderbird, but it's still got a rough edge or two, and annoyingly, remains an "add-on" which aesthetically sends the wrong signal. On KDE, Kontact (encompassing Kmail, Korganizer for calendars and Kontact) works very well for my techie colleagues but is a bit weird for non-technical staff. I've also looked at Zimbra and the former Zarafa (now Kopano) and Kolab and some others, and Fastmail's web client remains the easiest and friendliest solution, while Evolution remains the best desktop client capable of handling IMAP/CALDAV/CARDDAV. It's annoying though. On Windows I'd just install emClient and call it a day (and would avoid Outlook, which I desperately dislike).

KDE's Kontact PIM has been best-of-breed general office communications on Linux in my experience.

It doesn't suffer GNOME disease, it has mail, contacts, calendar, RSS, and if you want, a browser. It's reasonably stable and robust.

My principle preference remains console tools -- Mutt, lbdb, and a mash of other tools, or the Emacs world -- but that's not what the general end-user probably wants.

I've also found Sylpheed is an exceptionally good "just email and contacts" application. Fast, light, and simple.

https://www.kde.org/applications/office/kontact/

http://sylpheed.sraoss.jp/en/

Thanks for these suggestions. I, at least, am going to try them. I've used Thunderbird for years, then recently switched to Evolution and Gnome. But whilst gnome looks pretty I'm not really finding it a good fit for me. This gives me a final shove to try KDE so thanks for that.

I'm surprised you see Evolution as a solution

Before I switched away from Gnome I had Evolution set up. It was slow, you couldn't make more than one operation at a time and notifications worked randomly. Even if you had new email, Evolution sometimes decided not to notify you for days. Reminders and synchronization of calendar and tasks were even worse.

> If Mozilla were ever to offer its own paid email, calendar, and contacts subscription service, powered by open-source code, and backed with strong customer/data/privacy protections, I would sign up in a heartbeat.

Ditto. I use Apple products and accounts for this, but I recently set up both of my parents with Google accounts (buying them Chromebooks and integrating them with their existing Android phones and Gmail). I don't like having Google having so much of my parents' personal data, but the solution was cost effective and my parents are not on the front lines of the battles over internet privacy.

Apple is decent, but if I could choose an open-source, standards-based Mozilla offering for managing all this stuff I definitely would, for both myself and others.

Can someone explain? Honestly, because I have never fathomed: Why has calendaring and associated PIM-stuff been grafted onto email specifically? Is it a spill-over from the strange land of Outlook/Exchange? My Thunderbird does really decent service handling my mail. If I need to look at a calendar, I'd typically open a, you know ... calendar application.

It's a spillover from the strange (but comprehensive) land of enterprise communication and productivity software like of Lotus Notes, Exchange, and GroupWise, but also influenced by the web browser "suites" of the late 1990s.

Email naturally gives rise to contact management; in corporate settings most of this is derived from org-driven data, which can be laid out in a hierarchical directory. These often support LDAP.

For management of personal contacts, this is imperfect. In the mid-1990s, PDAs and web pages made a detached 'contact' datatype useful, so vCard was developed by the Versit Consortium [1], the makers of vCalendar. These efforts were later transferred to the Internet Mail Consortium, where vCalendar was renamed iCalendar, but vCard kept its name.

Right around this time IETF's RFC 2425 [2] pondered ways to express and map vCard-like contact information in other protocols and applications, like Email and Directories. And work on WebDAV was spun up to bring more structure to distributed authoring with HTTP.

WebDAV was hardly a sweeping success, but it provided a reasonable alternative to proprietary protocols like those of Microsoft, so further work around bringing calendaring and contact management on top of WebDAV continued in the early 2000s. This brought about CalDAV, CardDAV, and GroupDAV, and enabled more of these applications to interoperate.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Versit_Consortium [2] https://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc2425

Because meeting invitations are typically using mail as a transport format.

Now, I don't really think that is a good solution to the problem, but it is the way it is.

> If I need to look at a calendar, I'd typically open a, you know ... calendar application.

Years ago, Mozilla created a calendar application called Sunbird [1].

[1] https://www-archive.mozilla.org/projects/calendar/sunbird/

> I'd typically open a, you know ... calendar application.

such as..

Such as there might have been plenty of, had most of them not folded into various email apps a long time ago.

For daily schedulings, I use Osmo. My plans and reminders and appointments do not belong on a server.

This Osmo [1]? Well, good for you. But this software is not capacitive/finger friendly. Its for resistive/pen usage. The rest of us need a mobile e-mail and PIM client which works with a capacitive touch screen (and fingers). Also, many do want online synchronization so that their desktop, laptop, and mobile phone are synced. You can even self-host with Nextcloud as an individual or company.

[1] http://www.clayo.org/osmo/

Lots of good answers already, but one fundamental answer is simply that the first vaguely interoperable spec for events with attendees offered email as a transport mechanism (iMIP). Everything since has fallen back to that.

Integration with Google's calendars just works though, has done so for years — use the Lightning add-on and the Provider for Google Calendar add-on.

It kind of works, most of the time. On other occasions you'll get meeting reminders you can't dismiss, event cancellations which stack a new crossed out date on the list for every "update" click, events where you can't set attendance, and the annoying "you clicked dismiss, would you like to submit the modified event to the server" dialog. And that's on a good day :-(

There's lots of outstanding bugs unfortunately.

See https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1314185 - earliest dependent bug is 8 years old.

It's never worked well for me, e.g., when responding to third party calendar invitations, when moving meetings with others, when using two-factor authentication, when adding contacts on multiple devices.

Both of those add-ons have always been clunky and brittle for me. They have caused me to miss appointments and have also occasionally messed up my contact data.

I would never, ever use these add-ons for work.

See viraptor's comment for links to reported bugs: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16340039

The entire email client froze up the very first time I tried to sync my Google calendar via Lightning. On subsequent syncs the UI only became unresponsive for several seconds. I dunno why sync was running on the UI thread, but it made Thunderbird nearly unusable until I disabled it.

Used to use these in work until our internal security team banned all desktop clients. "Just works" is incredibly charitable.

The biggest problem, IMO, with the contacts system is how limited it is. You get two email addresses and two phone numbers per contact, that are pre-labeled "work" and "home", and that's it. It absolutely must have the ability to add arbitrary numbers of physical addresses, email addresses, and phone numbers to a contact, as well as give each field an arbitrary name. I cannot comprehend how it can't do this. Every other address book on the planet allows this. I have some contacts with 8 email addresses, 4-5 phone numbers, multiple physical addresses, all with custom names for what each of them are. So the fact that thunderbird can't handle this makes it unusable for me.

Only Apple and Google seem to allow this. I've made the same request to every other email/cal/contact provider I've used but they never do it.

Fastmail seemed interested for about 5 minutes but nothing came of it.

Trying to sync all this custom stuff across walled gardens (iOS and Android bi-directionl sync for instance) isn't the work of just a moment though. So i understand the reluctance.

Perhaps Thunderbird having its own built in flexible fields setup would be possible but you still really need to sync them to be fully useful.

I've never understood why contacts can't be stored inside a mail folder, so that every computer you setup thunderbird on gets its address book synced..

We do have a standard for this. RFC 6186 "Use of SRV Records for Locating Email Submission/Access Services" and RFC 6764 "Locating Services for Calendaring Extensions to WebDAV (CalDAV) and vCard Extensions to WebDAV (CardDAV)" should be sufficient.

Support these and it should be possible for any client email app to automatically configure both the email account and address book syncing using existing standard protocols. No need for a new one :)

That actually doesn't sound like a terrible idea. Structured markup in the email could be parsed by a client that knew what it was, and other clients would just have a folder of emails with contact info in them.

If they'd fix the security of their sync system, I'd do the same, equally fast. I definitely trust them more than I trust Google, and I wouldn't mind supporting them.

As it is, though, I bet that they'd integrate email, calendaring and their password sync, and there's no way I'll ever store passwords on a service which is able to snarf my password-encryption password simply my feeding me some malicious JavaScript.

Although, again knowing Mozilla, I guess that there's a chance they'd implement a whole different incompatible account system just for the lulz.

I run a Radicale (CardDav/CalDav) server for Calendar and Contacts:

http://radicale.org/

And I use DavDroid off of F-droid on my phone. Calendar sync and Contacts work great on my phone.

Calendar works great on Thunderbird .. contacts .. eh...last I checked there was a SOHO CardDav extension that was kinda garbage. Not sure if that's been improved yet.

Calender, contacts, and mail are separate apps on almost all mobile devices, so I think that's what people expect more and more.

But the key is that they should be able to seamlessly interact with one another.

Synchronization with calendars? A friend of mine wrote BirdieSync (http://birdiesync.com) for that purpose, and it was quite successful. Yes, it's not free, but some developers have rent to pay.

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