walkah: thunderbird

As I've lamented here before, I have had a hard time finding a successful, efficient way to keep all of my personal data (largely calendar and contact data) in sync across my systems and devices. Well, I had registered for a service known as Plaxo a while back to check it out. I can't exactly remember why it didn't stick at the time, but when I first saw Scoble talking about a "Big 3.0 release", I thought I'd give it another shot. Here's the good news...

Plaxo is currently successfully keeping my Mac OS X address book (for subsequent syncing to my phone), iCal, Thunderbird and Google Calendar in sync! I have to say, the Thunderbird support is pretty huge... Thunderbird LDAP support has never been what I would like, so this is a great intermediary.

However, the news that pushed me to blog about my Plaxo usage is this: (as of it looks like yesterday) Plaxo is OpenID enabled!! Awesome! Nice addition to Basecamp and Blinksale in services that I actually use heavily that are OpenID enabled.

Thumbs up for Plaxo. Now... if I could just figure out how to get it to sync my address book pictures...

I know I'm a couple weeks late posting this, but the fine folks at Mozilla finally released Thunderbird 2.0. Now, I've wasted a lot of your time here in the past waffling between mail clients... but I've been using thunderbird consistently since the 2.0 betas and I think it might finally stick. Here's why (for me):

• Favorite folders: this feature allows you to mark certain folders (email folders, RSS feeds or saved searches) as "favorites" and you can limit the left-hand pane to view only those folders. For me, since I use procmail heavily to sort mailing list traffic, etc. this is a great feature for seeing my most "important" folders.
• UI updates: like Firefox 2.0, Thunderbird got some subtle yet very pleasant UI updates - check them out for yourself. I also like the sound of this hack to make tags look prettier.
• Tags: like the old "labels" messages can now have optionally multiple tags. I know after I read GTD I'm going to love this one even more.

Also, while not a core feature, I'm very pleased with the new Growl add-on for new message notification (I had been using YAMB before which wasn't optimal.

Still on my wishlist: sender pictures (preferably from LDAP userpicture or mac address book integration) and better offline detection for OS X. Otherwise, I love it.

Here's what I want: ubiquitous access to my important personal data (schedule, contacts, etc). Now, currently this typically means using web applications for storing and editing your data. This has been working fairly well for me in the case of Google Calendar. The big issue with the web is sometimes I need this data when I'm offline - which, yes, sometimes happens. To circumvent this, I've been using gcal's iCal feed to see things in Apple's iCal (always loved that naming ambiguity). This has the added advantage of allowing me to sync this data to my phone. But, here's my complaint (you knew there'd be one): updates only happen one way. That means I can't add a new meeting from my phone, or even from iCal - I have to do it all from google calendar - which means I have to be online to do it. The situation is worse for contacts because I have yet to find a nice address book tool that will write to LDAP (my centralized store of choice). That said, here are some interesting things I'm playing with now:

Spanning Sync is currently my favourite and what motivated me to blog this - and timely as today they released v1.0. I've been playing with it for the last few beta releases. It's worked really well and is *exactly* what I want. The downfall is a $25/year subscription fee (or $65 one time). However, I like it enough that I might just bite the bullet for this one.

Address book X LDAP automatically sync's your OS X address book to an LDAP server - built to work with OpenLDAP (yay!). I haven't tried this one yet - it's also not free- but I've used AddressBook4LDAP (from the same author) in the past, so I have high hopes for this.

Both of these are OS X only tools (both using the iSync framework), but until I take action on my moving back to regular linux desktop usage - perhaps I should stop making such a big deal out of that fact.

Now, really, it would be nice if iCal and AddressBook (or maybe some elegant replacements from the mozilla community or elsewhere) worked like this out of the box. Sort of like how Mail.app and IMAP work together. I want a server that stores my data (ideally that has a web-based interface for the off time I don't have my own computer handy) with an offline mode. We have LDAP and CalDAV for server technologies... Dear Apple, I say pretty please. Am I the only one? What are other folks using?

with the 1.5 release of thunderbird upon us (currently 1.5rc1), coupled with my foray back into linux on the desktop, i've been giving it another go. looks like most of my issues from my previous post have been addressed: specifically on-the-fly spellchecking and being able to create saved searches for flagged messages (big win!).

so, i'm currently using thunderbird full time on all my machines - complete with LDAP for my addressbook, and i'm liking it a lot. the multiple identity support in *one* account is great (since I have all my various mail forwarded to one place) - it means I can have a per-identity .signature (which since I maintain those in CVS - means they're uniform across machines). but, of course, it wouldn't be a blog post if i didn't complain about *something*. So here it is, my 2 big thunderbird feature requests:

1. LDAP entry editing. If my dn has write access, I want to be able to edit LDAP addressbook entries from thunderbird. Please :)
2. sender faces support. i have really grown to love this part of mail.app. Having people's pictures show with the headers in a mail message is a hugely effective visual cue (way to go apple!). i've got the MessageFaces extension installed which helps for people that actually send X-Face headers (which more or less nobody actually does)... and you can specify a local directory for images. but here's what i *really* want: search my LDAP directory for jpegPhoto entries that match and use those. that would rule.

mostly though, i'm pretty happy, especially after putting the following in my user.js file:

user_pref("mail.check_all_imap_folders_for_new", true);
user_pref("mailnews.show_send_progress", false);
user_pref("mailnews.reply_header_type", 2);

The other big tip i have for those of you as addicted to growl as I am is to grab the YAMB extension which allows you to use growlnotify for new messages.

Anyone else have some good thunderbird tips?