Some time ago, I setup DavMail POP/IMAP/SMTP/Caldav/Carddav/LDAP Exchange and Office 365 Gateway on my development laptop to connect Thunderbird to my mail account at work. Handling email was the largest change of swapping from my Android centric work station back to regular desktop Linux.

Give or take my generally meh feelings towards today’s desktop mail clients, Thunderbird especially: this has worked out pretty well, and with pretty minimal pain, thanks to the Actually Worth Reading setup guides.

Today, I finally got around to connecting the address book and calendar functions, and much to my surprise: those actually, Just Work (tm). Which is kind of nice: because I’ve been switching to my tablet for those functions. Thunderbird collected addresses thing, also helpful.

When the rise of the S-Pen made me upgrade tablets, I had to contend with the loss of video output during my otherwise painless Tan S2 -> Tab S3 conversion. Eventually, I traded in some old hardware and got a cheap assed Chromebook that was new enough to do Android apps, and serve as a replacement for docking my tablet. That mostly worked, give or take that Chrome OS is like 10 x buggier and more restrictive than native Android. But eventually that combined with the crappy performance lead me to replace it with using my development laptop directly, rather than using SSH and SMB to access it. The performance grumbles, such as Play Music stuttering whenever opening heavier web pages, made more powerful hardware worth the coin—the quality of Chrome OS as an Android replacement, made using a Linux or NT based system a better option. Thus rather than increment debt, I said screw out and started using my development laptop directly because that was the simplest, cheapest way to kill both birds with one stone.

So, I guess I’ll get to see how well Thunderbird’s calendar works. For my pen use cases, typically my synced to all my devices taste in calendars are used; and I maintain several. My exchange calendar, basically exists purely for dealing with meetings and events going through Exchange users. Since meetings are inescapable, dealings with Exchange calendars.

Coincidentally, Microsoft Outlook for iPad rather sucks as a mail client if you have any significant volume of mail to process, and it’s calendar function is little better than typing cal into an xterm. But it at last syncs with little fuss.