Greetings!

Ok, so I've been googling around for some time now, and haven't found a satisfactory answer to this problem. Last year, I was mostly at home, and thus was able to use my desktop for all of my groupware-like needs (specifically: calendar, contacts, email), because my laptop was basically a fancy typewriter. This year, however, that has changed -- I'm away from my home a significant amount of time, and my laptop has become my fancy PDA as well. That's about how I'd like to treat it.

So, I would like to run some sort of e-mail/calendar system on my desktop (probably Evolution, but I am not picky; I'm perfectly happy to use any program that does the job), and synchronize it with a similar (or, more likely, the same) program on my laptop -- a task that seems trivial to me, but that I have failed miserably to find a way to do.

While my desktop is always on-line, and one possibility then is just to use my desktop as a groupware server, that is ruled out by the fact that the laptop is not always online. Another possibility is keeping files synchronized between the two systems, but since changes could occur on either one and need to be merged, the only way I can think to do this would be something like a subversion repository, which would only work right if everything is text-based.


Does anyone know a way to keep e-mail and calendar synchronized across two computers? Again, I'm willing to use any PIM program that does the job .

You could run a small mail server on your PC and connect to that from your laptop.

Look into thunderbird with lightning (and extension), which lets you use webdav to share calendars. This would require you to run apache or similar, but it works pretty well.

I keep my contacts in ldap - a bit of overkill, but you can use that over the net with ssl/tls

Or you could set up a vpn

I have a VPN, for when my laptop has an internet connection. This is a minority of the time, though

I think Evolution does webdav as well, which does take care of the calendars. Doesn't synchronize the e-mail though, and two-way sync is definitely best. Though looking at the evolution folder, I'm left wondering whether maybe it's actually all text. There are a few .db files that worry me, but the majority of it seems to be XML... if that's the case, a subversion repository or similar would work fine.

Sorry, now I guess I'm thinking out loud :P