Notes for KWLUG July 2016: Sync mail, calendars and contacts

Chris Irwin described his recent experiments with mail/calendar/contact synchronization to KWLUG on July 4 2016. He discussed his goals, the options he considered, and what he is using currently.

• Chris is only creating a system for a single user or small family of users
  • multi-user support is not necessary
• baikal is the calendar server with a very simple user interface
• Chris has mostly moved back to google
  • on android, even if sync is disabled, it still puts things into the primary google calendar and not the self-hosted one
  • this makes apps misbehave, such as things like the Cineplex app which pushes events into an unexpected calendar
  • pros
  • first class on android
  • they are their own standard eco-system
  • cons
  • does not really support standards so other clients will not work
• on the desktop he is using the following software:
  • email
  • mutt
  • not much
  • imapsync
  • contacts
  • khard
  • vdirsyncer
  • goobook
  • calendar
  • khal
  • vdirsyncer
  • todo (sort of)
  • todoman, not really using this anymore
  • may move to taskwarrior in the future
  • vdirsyncer
• Chris used to use offlineimap but encountered sync issues every few months
• imapsync has been working well for 3 years now. Well enough that Chris has to remind himself about how to use it for the presentation
• mail is stored locally in maildir to it can be accessed by multiple clients (e.g., mutt, Gnome evolution)
• appears that Thunderbird might be getting maildir support soon too (it is mentioned in the CHANGELOG, but not officially announced)
• Chris suggests starting with a simple mutt configuration
  • slowly add useful things as you come across things you need
• he also puts maildir into git and sync it to his gitlab server
• security concerns
  • protection from someone walking about with this laptop, and really nothing else
  • keeping in mind that google has clear copies of his emails
  • servers at home are full-disk encrypted and need a password on reboot
• davmail proxy which will contact to Microsoft Exchange and provides IMAP, SMTP, CalDav, and LDAP
• evolutions components are getting skinnier
  • hooks into the gnome notifications
  • supports google
  • the calendar looks nice and simple
  • they are still backed by the evolution database
• NextCloud (formerly OwnCloud) could be the next step for more self-hosting
• talking about gitlab hosting