Playing with Programs

I’m working on a user story form myself:

As a travelling consultant, I would like to have a public or
semi-public agenda on the web, so people around me can see where I am’

As a consequence, i’m looking into web calendaring software. I found a few most notably webcalendar and egroupware) that can synchronize with desktop calendaring and mail software (e.g. outlook, kontact, evolution). Therefore, I’m looking into kontact again. Kontact is kde’s personal information manager, with the mail application kmail and agenda softaware korganizer as main attractors.

Looking at kmail again turns out to be a pleasant surprise. I switched from kmail to thunderbird as my main e-mail client over half a year ago. I switched, so I could assist people who were switching to thunderbird on other platforms (unlike kmail that runs only on linux, thunderbird runs on all major operating systems). I like thunderbird for its easy adaptive junk-mail filtering system and the simple and powerful ways it has for searching and sorting e-mail.

The one thing I do not particularly like about thunderbird, is the way it handles the IMAP protocol for downloading mail. When I use IMAP, it does not automatically refresh all my mail folders, only my inbox folder. I have over 20 folders outside my inbox, for instance separate folders for some organizations I work for. I have missed e-mail sent to me by colleagues, because I did not see there was new mail in their folder.
I have thought about removing all folders, except the one for mailing lists, and just working with an inbox. That would be simple, except for the spam I’m still getting – all the filtered folders are virtually spam-free.

Anyway, kmail has this new feature called cached IMAP. Googling for it, I found this term mentioned only on pages about kmail, so I assume this is experimental. What it does is it combines the best of IMAP (all mail stored on server, so accessible anywhere, e.g. from my laptop(s), deskttop and webmail) and POP (mail stored on the client, so it e.g. travels on thetrain).

So far, I’m happy with it. It seems somewhat slow at times, as the server side
seems to have no support for caching and synchronizing differences. It is stable, unlike an earlier (uncached) implementation of IMAP in kmail, which was another reason I switched to thunderbird.
I’m going to try it out for a while, and let you know how it goes. Have to go now, my train has arrived at the station