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Old 05-01-2014, 07:14 AM   #1
MacLinDroid
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Outlook alternatives in Linux?


I formatted my hard drive.
Installed a newly acquired Mint 16 32-bit.
Installed all updates.

Evolution wasted no time to corrupt its calendar via Google. It also stopped doing sync and deleted all but one entry, luckily my data on my phone was not affected, nor was Google data altered. It seems that there is a hiccup on the computer side of things.

Thunderbird mimics mail retrieval but does not do anything - just goes limp. No error reports, nothing. I have only one POP account with its corresponding Google contacts & calendar sync. It refused to accept the CORRECT settings for my own domain's mail accounts in POP. IMAP stops working after a few hours and I wanted to see if POP would work better. Perhaps there is a bug in Thunderbird's authentication procedure?

I need a PIM organizer.
I am in bad health and do not have energy, literally, to spend days on end trying to get these things to work.

Trust me, after three decades, I know how to set up mail accounts. It is not an issue with settings.

Claws mail also had its quirks on previous installations.

Are there alternatives that work?

Last edited by MacLinDroid; 05-01-2014 at 07:23 AM.
 
Old 05-01-2014, 07:49 AM   #2
ondoho
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i totally agree with you.
i think linux really, really sucks.
everything is so full of bugs! it's impossible to find a program that actually DOES WHAT YOU WANT.
well, what can you expect, bunch of tinfoilhatters, aren't even getting paid for it. some kind of basement hobby coding project.

ps: i'm quite impressed by the size of africa!
 
Old 05-01-2014, 08:03 AM   #3
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The size of Africa......I have many, many American friends (USA, of course!). I am so used to getting questions like "do you know idonije?" me: "now, not all at all, where is he from?" American: "He lives in Ghana" me "I am in Cape Town, South Africa." American "then you should know him, right?"

OK, that is almost 3,000 miles or close on 5,0000 km! What a sizable suburb to know just everybody!

Or: 'Where are you from"
Me: "South Africa"
Am: "Is that in Africa?"
Me: "Yes, but I am in South Africa"
Am: "In which country are you?"
me: "South Africa"
Am: "Yeah, but in which country are you there?"
Me: "South Africa.........."



It is no wonder that people do not understand why cloud sync between phones and computers doesn't work here, as the continent even today is mostly unknown and misunderstood by most. Hollywood made the USA everybody's place, but this side of the world is not perceived by many. The Sahara desert alone is larger than the USA and that is but one third of the continent.

Optic fibre is being installed across this continent but it will take many years before its benefits reaches end users, if at all.


Meanwhile, it is a struggle to get systems to work as the old recipe of Outlook + Nokia sadly is history. It was as perfect a solution as I have ever seen.
 
Old 05-01-2014, 08:21 AM   #4
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I've been using Thunderbird + the Lightning plugin for years without issue. I'm using a POP account in Thunderbird, and the Lightning plugin handles calandering, to dos, and events. Its not quite as good as Outlook's handling, but it isn't bad.

I'm not sure about your email fetching problem though. I would check the SSL security settings and make sure they match the email domain settings. I've found that's usually where my problems lie on new systems. Sometimes a service uses a port for the ssl that Thunderbird doesn't expect, and you can change that in the account settings.
 
Old 05-01-2014, 08:30 AM   #5
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Same here, have been using it for many, many years, on anything from Windows 3.1/95 right up to Windows 8, also on many distros of Linux and many versions of each. The problems started arising around 2008, Google and see what others say. The older the version, the better it worked. Perhaps it became less reliable because of too many checkpoints in the newer releases. It seems that some of the bugginess is around account authentication.
 
Old 05-01-2014, 08:40 AM   #6
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Hi there,

Quote:
Originally Posted by MacLinDroid View Post
Meanwhile, it is a struggle to get systems to work as the old recipe of Outlook + Nokia sadly is history.
what's that about Outlook and Nokia, and why is it history? Well, Microsoft just swallowed Nokia, so the connection should be expected to get even closer, better ...

Quote:
Originally Posted by MacLinDroid View Post
It was as perfect a solution as I have ever seen.
It feels strange to see the word "perfect" in context with "Outlook". Outlook of all, the near-perfect example of crap ...
But apart from that: If you're that much into Outlook, why don't you run MS Office inside a Windows VM? Or even stay with Windows at all?

[X] Doc CPU
 
Old 05-01-2014, 08:43 AM   #7
ondoho
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Quote:
Originally Posted by MacLinDroid View Post
It is no wonder that people do not understand why cloud sync between phones and computers doesn't work here, as the continent even today is mostly unknown and misunderstood by most. Hollywood made the USA everybody's place, but this side of the world is not perceived by many. The Sahara desert alone is larger than the USA and that is but one third of the continent.
it's true. i thought cloud sync works only in the usa.
i also thought the usa is larger than africa (counting alaska in, of course). thanks for clarifying that.
so how is cloud sync these days, comparing south africa to the sahara?
 
Old 05-01-2014, 08:44 AM   #8
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Quote:
Originally Posted by dolphin_oracle View Post
I've been using Thunderbird + the Lightning plugin for years without issue. I'm using a POP account in Thunderbird, and the Lightning plugin handles calandering, to dos, and events. Its not quite as good as Outlook's handling, but it isn't bad.

I'm not sure about your email fetching problem though. I would check the SSL security settings and make sure they match the email domain settings. I've found that's usually where my problems lie on new systems. Sometimes a service uses a port for the ssl that Thunderbird doesn't expect, and you can change that in the account settings.

SSL settings have been checked and re-checked many times over and, yes, that is where the hiccup, or part of it, seems to be. All my other mail clients, such as on the iPhone, in OS X Mountain Lion, MS Outlook 2007 in either Windows XP, 7 or 8, accept SSL over port 993 for IMAP or 995 for POP. Same goes for the native Android mail app and MailDroid. Just Thunderbird does not! It also does not accept my mail server name being mail.mydomain.co.za which also is the SMTP server. Thunderbird wants to give it fancy names not recognized by the server. I managed to get it to work but on non-secure connections via ports 110 and 25 respectively.


Evolution works better but fails in the calendar department.


Some Thunderbird releases do not support Lightning and also not Zindus, both of which had worked reliable for maybe a decade. Progress seems more like regression to me.
 
Old 05-01-2014, 08:53 AM   #9
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Quote:
Originally Posted by MacLinDroid View Post
Progress seems more like regression to me.
you really should get a hand on that source code and start improving it! maybe you can fork thunderbird on github.
 
Old 05-01-2014, 08:59 AM   #10
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Quote:
Originally Posted by ondoho View Post
it's true. i thought cloud sync works only in the usa.
i also thought the usa is larger than africa (counting alaska in, of course). thanks for clarifying that.
so how is cloud sync these days, comparing south africa to the sahara?

I live in a world-class area South Africa. One of my closest neighbours is Oprah Winfrey - she has a penthouse here -, the perimeter is a world-class marina development with some of the most exquisite venues to visit. Parliament is three miles away, with the entire continent's most prime business district in between. Yesterday, I tried three different cellular providers to get a signal strong enough to sync my phone with my computer, but it failed.


My son needed to contact me from a venue 20 minutes away from the central business district and had to climb up a pole to get a GSM signal strong enough to send me a text message. My daughter lives on a posh estate between Johannesburg and Thswane (Pretoria.) She has to shuffle between three service providers to get a mobile signal; most of the time, she cannot be reached by phone at all and doing something like a VoIP call is a pipe dream.


Bear in mind that our mineral wealth is not in the cities but far out in remote places. Modern day communications actually keep people from participating in the global economy instead of drawing people closer. It is not strange for even the poorest Africans to have two or three cell phones. As they move from one area to another, they jump from one service provider to another. This happens in an area as small as 10 miles in diameter, let alone the entire continent! These people need to access markets to ensure they deliver their produce fresh to the right customer; it is quite a challenge.


In between, our copper lines get stolen in broad daylight and land line connections are being compromised on a national level. Fibre is the solution as it has no used market value but it gets priced so high that nobody can afford it. I can sing with John Foggerty "have you ever seen the rain on a cloudless day?"
 
Old 05-01-2014, 09:04 AM   #11
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Quote:
Originally Posted by Doc CPU View Post
Hi there,



what's that about Outlook and Nokia, and why is it history? Well, Microsoft just swallowed Nokia, so the connection should be expected to get even closer, better ...



It feels strange to see the word "perfect" in context with "Outlook". Outlook of all, the near-perfect example of crap ...
But apart from that: If you're that much into Outlook, why don't you run MS Office inside a Windows VM? Or even stay with Windows at all?

[X] Doc CPU
Over almost two decades, neither Lotus Organizer nor MS Outlook failed me, ever. Now if that is crap, what you are using must be heavenly! Your bias is based upon opinion and not fact. It throws your post into a corner where I collect crap. Be factual and precise; do not slam anything just because you don't like it. I am not a Microsoft fan, have gone through the Hell of Gates too many times, yet Outlook was the ONE application that just always worked. No, OneNote also did fine. The rest had its nags and bugs.

I complain about both Thunderbird and Evolution, both applications I happen to LIKE, yet there are bugs that need to be sorted and that is why I am here. To find either a fix or a working alternative.
 
Old 05-01-2014, 09:07 AM   #12
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Quote:
Originally Posted by Doc CPU View Post
Hi there,



what's that about Outlook and Nokia, and why is it history? Well, Microsoft just swallowed Nokia, so the connection should be expected to get even closer, better ...


[X] Doc CPU

Nokia killed PC Suite/OVI Suite/Nokia Suite.
Microsoft killed local sync.

For well over a decade, millions of us had a sweet experience of PIM sync between phone and computer. Hardly ever missed a beat. MS taking over Nokia is just the cherry on top of a rotten cake.
 
Old 05-01-2014, 09:17 AM   #13
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Originally Posted by ondoho View Post
you really should get a hand on that source code and start improving it! maybe you can fork thunderbird on github.
Brain damage due to a number of strokes ensured that I will never be able to be doing just that. I can speak again, I can also walk again (after spinal injury long ago) but there are things I simply cannot do any more. Thirty years ago, I jumped at challenges like this. Life happens and changes us. It is called Photoshop. Cruel, eh?
 
Old 05-01-2014, 09:54 AM   #14
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Hi there,

Quote:
Originally Posted by MacLinDroid View Post
Over almost two decades, neither Lotus Organizer nor MS Outlook failed me, ever. Now if that is crap, what you are using must be heavenly!
maybe it is. On Windows, I used Outlook Express many years, and I was very satisfied with it, honestly. It did have a few reliability issues, however, when handling IMAP accounts. That's why I switched to Thunderbird, still under Windows. The first version of T-Bird I used was 1.5.0.7, I remember.With T-Bird, it was the opposite: It worked absolutely reliable, never ever failed me, but it was a bit clumsy to work with it, some tasks were a lot smoother in OEx and slightly awkward in T-Bird. But I got used to that quickly. It needs a few extensions, though, to get fully comfortable - like the "Super Date Format" to display dates properly in ISO-8601 format, or the "Folderpane Tools" to sort folders the way I want them, or "Signature Switch" to automatically append a signature depending on what identity I'm using as the sender address.
When I turned to Linux about 2007..2009, I never used anything else than T-Bird. So what I know about Evolution, for instance, is basically hearsay.

But I do know Outlook, because I had the displeasure of having to use it at work for a few years, and it was a PITA from the beginning. It is very difficult, for example, to make Outlook produce fully RFC2822-compliant mails (usually, a certain percentage of sent mails cannot be properly displayed by other mail clients, let alone transmitting appointments or stuff like that disguised as e-mails); it's difficult ot prevent it from sometimes putting plain names of contacts in quotes, sometimes not (I've never found a pattern about that); it can't import or export messages in RFC2822 format; it apparently can't append a signature the usual way, that is, separated with dash-dash-blank-linefeed from the message text; and it automatically comes with a lot of stuff I've never needed or wanted, like all that workgroup things. All I want is a mail and news client, nothing more. That's what OEx and T-Bird were/are.

Quote:
Originally Posted by MacLinDroid View Post
Your bias is based upon opinion and not fact.
It's not. It's based upon proper experience, and that experience has led me to giving Outlook a wide berth over the years. With some growl I accept the few occasions I have to use it, but avoid it otherwise.

Quote:
Originally Posted by MacLinDroid View Post
yet Outlook was the ONE application that just always worked.
If you'd said that about MS Word, I would agree ...

Quote:
Originally Posted by MacLinDroid View Post
No, OneNote also did fine.
Never heard of that before. But that's possibly because it is also beyond the scope of what I consider useful.

[X] Doc CPU
 
Old 05-01-2014, 10:01 AM   #15
ondoho
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Quote:
Originally Posted by MacLinDroid View Post
One of my closest neighbours is Oprah Winfrey - she has a penthouse here -, the perimeter is a world-class marina development with some of the most exquisite venues to visit. Parliament is three miles away, with the entire continent's most prime business district in between. Yesterday, I tried three different cellular providers to get a signal strong enough to sync my phone with my computer, but it failed.
i'm glad for you that you live in this world-class marina.
and say hello to oprah! i didn't know she was african.
anyhow, such a poor signal so close to the parliament of africa? that's an outrage.
Quote:
My son needed to contact me from a venue 20 minutes away from the central business district and had to climb up a pole to get a GSM signal strong enough to send me a text message.
i'd have loved to see that. did he wear a business suit?

Quote:
In between, our copper lines get stolen in broad daylight and land line connections are being compromised on a national level.
i'm very sympathetic.
no wonder neither thunderbird nor evolution are working out there.
outlook must be using some special algorithm unknown to free software coders, bypassing copper land lines.
 
  


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