I'm looking for a nice and easy (free) Windows program so I would be able to quickly manage my Google agenda. Now I always log into the agenda in my browser, but I would like a MS Windows management program to do the same. Like the "Agenda" app on my iPad does I guess.

I've seen Sunbird from Mozilla, but that project seems to be halted? There's also the Lightning add-in for Thunderbird, but the reviews of that add-in are far from raving.

Is there a better free alternative? I don't need a lot of bells and whistles, only the basic agenda managing.

Thx!

Nobody? Ok, it seems this is a bigger issue than I figured it would be.

For now I've just installed the Lightning add for Thunderbird. I can see why some people don't like it, and it's also not easy to set up. But I've got it running now and it does a pretty decent job. Certainly do-able for my use.

The only thing I can think of that I didn't chime in on, is that when searching, you should use the word "calendar" instead of agenda. Apart from that, since you're looking for Windows and Google, I don't have anything to personally recommend.

Doesn't Windows come with a built-in calendar app too?

I used Lightning for a while, but it is pretty awful. Even when it works it doesn't work very well and I gave up on it after a while when I had to keep fixing it.

Nowdays I do most of my agenda/calendaring via my iPhone/iPad, syncing to Google Calendar via Neuvasync.

And if I need to do it on a PC, the Google Calendar site is much more usable than Lightning ever was.

XP, no.

Vista and Win7, yes. It is part of the optional download of Windows Live Mail (the app that replaced Outlook Express and was thankfully a complete rewrite rather than just a new version of OE).

As far as I know, it only does a one way sync with Google Calendar though, so probably not very useful in this case.

Sorry, Archeon, I didn't even see this thread for some reason! Sorry about that. But I agree, you really should search with "calendar" instead of "agenda." Agenda is just a viewing mode within Google Calendar.

That said, Sunbird would have been my suggestion. I'm sorry I don't have a better option for you...

Thanks for the suggestion about searching for "calendar" instead of "agenda", I'll give that a try.

If all else fails, I'll just keep using the online gmail agenda, no biggie. Lightning indeed is pretty awful as I have noticed over the last couple of days.

I would like to try Sunbird, but when I click on the Windows, English link, this is what I get: click. So I'm guessing Sunbird doesn't exist any more?

Wow, that's a pretty big fail on Mozilla's part. I don't think they've stopped offering it, I just think the link is broken. I've emailed the web admin about it.

It might not be exactly what you want, but there's a desktop widget called Rainlendar that might look interesting to you. I believe it can use Google Calendar as a source.

Seems interesting, but unfortunately, as it turns out, only the Pro version is able to use other online calendars as a source. Bummer, because I do like the idea of having the calendar on the desktop. I might consider buying it because it's not all that expensive anyway.

Ah, I didn't see that. However, you can at least test it out in the meantime. You can install the free version, then go to Google Calendar and export your calendar(s). Then go to Rainlendar and you can import your calendar(s).

Then you can play around with the program to see if it works for you, and decide if you want to pony up for the "Pro" version.

Then again, like you said it isn't very expensive

On the Sunbird page it says:

Well would you look at that? I completely missed it. Still, it's pretty bad form to have a completely non-functional link. Particularly one so prominent.

I'm disappointed, too. Sunbird was a neat project, but they definitely didn't put the same amount of effort behind it as the others.

Thunderbird has effort behind it? Wow, disappointing results.

Yeah... there's a reason why I use Mutt. At least they're honest about suckage.

If you're still interested in trying Sunbird - with the understanding that there's no support going forward - I received a reply from their web guy who gave me a link to where you can still download it. Here it is.

Thanks for the effort Matt, but I don't think I'll start using software which is already EOL'd. I'll have a closer look at that Rainlendar calendar software instead.

Is that the only reason? Do you have a hair shirt?

I think I'm toward the "power user" end in terms of email usage, and Thunderbird works wonderfully for me. I briefly tried to use Apple's Mail.app many moons ago, but its handling of shared IMAP folder subscriptions, caching, etc. was atrocious. Outlook for the Mac is even worse.

Thunderbird isn't the prettiest UI in the world, but it handles my three email accounts (one Exchange, two IMAP) flawlessly. It does X.509 and GPG encryption/signing with very little fuss, and with the help of an extension, it even shows me a nice visualization of email threads that I can click on to navigate threads. Searches by subject, sender, body text are all quite fast. It handles multipart/mime messages properly, it has many options for filtering out HTML email cruft and just showing me the text in a proper monospace font... What else could anyone want from an email program?

Agreed. I don't really see any problem with Thunderbird either. I'd use it if I didn't actually love the GMail web interface, but I understand I'm a fool because of that too


Meh, perhaps, but the new look is pretty nice - if somewhat monochromatic.

No. There are many reasons I use it, but here are the top few:

• Ability to use vim as the text editor (okay, other clients can do this, even web clients, if you have the appropriate browser plugins)
• It's a lightweight console app, so I can run it via an ssh connection, even when I can't do X-forwarding.
• Macros, macros, macros.
• It can pipe email to other programs. In conjunction with macros, this allows me to do partially-automated processing of email (in cases where fully-automated processing without human intervention isn't appropriate).
• Bounce.

Those last three features I use daily (except for bounce, which I use less regularly), and have never found in any other email client.


As the owner of two cats, they all seem to be hair shirts.

Lol! I know what you mean. I needed two sheets of the lint roller to get the hair off my pant legs today.