I've migrated from Outlook to Thunderbird/Lightning

Up until quite recently, I've been using MS Outlook 2003 as my email, calendaring, and contacts application. It's nice to have everything all in one and it synchronized very seamlessly with my AT&T 8525 Windows Mobile phone.

However, being away from home more was troublesome because I was getting my mail via POP3 -- leaving about a weeks' worth of data on the server in case I needed to access it while on the road. However, that really was only a little helpful since once I downloaded email into Outlook, I then filed it into my various Personal & Business folders -- so going online via webmail while on the road only revealed the messages all the Inbox, unsorted.

What would I love? An Exchange server -- but that means hosting it myself at my house (easy, but I don't want my email hosted on a Comcast cable modem connection), in a data center on a dedicated or colo server (I don't want to pay $60-$100/month for that), or using a third-party Exchange Server hosting company -- not SUPER pricey, but still more than I wanted to pay (they are usually billed per user and have limits as to how much storage space you get).

I have instead chosen to go with IMAP -- leaving all of my mail on the server, in organized folders, fully accessible from my desktop email application(s), via Web mail, or on my phone. You may be wondering why I didn't just stick with Outlook since it supports IMAP. The reason is that IMAP support in Outlook is, well, crappy. I am a true believer that Microsoft didn't want to make it "too" good since it sort of competes in a way with Exchange, at least at a conceptual high-level.

Anyhow, having switched to Firefox a while back, I decided to go with Thunderbird, Mozilla's open-source email client. It works great. I then use the Lightning extension, which adds calendar functionality to Thunderbird. Then, I use another extension, Provider for Google Calendar, to sync my calendar with my Google Calendar. I have another extension as well to backup/sync my Thunderbird contacts onto the IMAP server in a special folder called Addressbooks Synchronizer, essentially backing them up to the server just in case. And now, when I access my email from the web, I have the exact same messages and all subfolders, so I don't skip a beat.

Additionally, I use GooSync on my Windows Mobile phone to sync my phone calendar with the same Google Calendar that I'm syncing too with the Thunderbird extension.

Take a look at http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=540330 for an article that covers the topics discussed in this post (except this guy used a different program (GMobileSync) on his Windows Mobile phone to do the Google Calendar sync).