(Excuse the top posting, I'm using my law school webmail right now.)

Hi Thomas,

Two nights ago I just set up free-in-both-senses groupware software for my 
freelance IT consulting business. I'm using a virtual private server (Linode) 
running SOGo (for webmail and calendaring and contacts), Funambol (for mobile 
device sync), Cyrus IMAPd and Postfix (for the underlying email setup), 
OpenLDAP (for sharing accounts among these apps), PostgreSQL (for storing the 
data), and Debian (as the underlying operating system). It meant being up 
system-hacking until 9am but so far it seems worth it. I even have calendar 
sync working with my desktop calendar app (KDE4's KOrganizer plus the 
community-created kcaldav addon) and calendar+email sync with my android phone, 
without having to give Google my data. :) Check back with me later about how 
well it works in practice, but I'm bullish so far. The webmail is decent too.

- Jimmy Kaplowitz
[email protected] [currently using the school's Novell GroupWise]
[email protected] [currently reading this using mutt and ssh]
[email protected] [current using the above SOGo setup]

>>> Thomas Levine  02/03/11 9:27 AM >>>
I'd like to move away from my wonderful, integrated, proprietary,
web-based Google Services Gmail, Google Calendar, Google Lists and
Google Docs. I ask for suggestions of what to move to.

I'd like to be able to share files across multiple computers. I need
some sort of web-based access, but it doesn't need to be great if I
can use a separate, superior, more flexible application.

The ability to access the services offline would be nice but is not
too important yet. I'm also not that concerned with privacy; I was in
fact considering releasing all of my emails publicly, but I found it
hard to do with the Gmail interface.

Email is probably the most important as my whole life is in there.
Proprietary Google searches lead me to
http://www.gnumail.org
http://www.runbox.com
http://www.fastmail.fm
These don't seem any cheaper than running a mail server on a virtual
private server, which would be more flexible. I don't think that would
be too annoying either. Thoughts on that?

There are a bunch of desktop calendar applications, and I'm sure some
of them are more awesome than Google Calendar. How does one sync them
across computers and version/backup them? My inclination is to use git
on a plain text calendar file if I'm not satisfied by the more
conventional approaches.

I *love* Google Lists for entering school assignment due dates, but
it's currently very closed, with no importing or exporting. It may be
less useful once I graduate in May as I'm likely not to have
assignments due every day, but some more advanced equivalent would be
wonderful. Does anyone know of an equivalent for this?

I don't use Google Docs much except for short-term collaboration with
mortals, and I don't mind using it that for situations like that. For
other situations, git and ssh is better. And I can use Gobby for
brainwriting.

Thanks

Tom
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