At Gravity Spike, we're not just about building websites. We're about using the internet as an effective business tool. I think I've just come up with the ultimate email and calendar system, accessible from your computer, or any computer via the web.
This article is more a place holder for the final story, so it is brief and lacks some information. I'm going to build a step by step guide a bit later on.
First, everything we are looking at is free.
You will need a Google Account. If you don't have one, we recommend getting one - and set it up with a gmail account rather than your own personal account. Doing that removes problems with expired domain names.
Once you have your gmail account setup, as well as via the web, you can access your email from an email client. Let's use Thunderbird, which is from Mozilla, the makers of Firefox. Instead of connecting to gmail via POP, we'll use IMAP - which is a very impressive alternative, that offers the sharing features we want.
Now, we want to grab the lighting add-on for Thunderbird, and a Google Calendar provider add-on as well. There's a great intro over here: http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=540330
Now, you have complete access to your email and calendar using a desktop client, and you also have access to that same information from any computer that let's you access google via the internet.
Big advantages of this system. Your email and calendar info is being stored at Gmail. If your computer crashes, you can get a new computer, enter your login details and have ALL your email back in a flash. You can access it from anywhere in the world, and even access the same data across multiple computers. It's your information where you want, when you want.