For some time I have been wanting to switch from Outlook to Thunderbird. Thunderbird is a mail client developed by Mozilla – the same organization that is behind the Firefox Browser. These are both open source tools and I am slowly migrating to open-source applications – the reasons deserve a whole separate post. They both have a rich offering of plugins and addons that extend their functionality. A popular Thunderbird addon is Lightning – which provides calendar functionality. Thunderbird & Lightning together are a formidable substitute to Outlook.
What has prevented me from making the transition until now was synchronizing my Nokia E65. The Nokia software provides a solution for Outlook. I could not find a solution for doing this with Thunderbird. Now I have. I found a nicely written post on how do this here (techies you might want to visit this wikipedia page on SyncML). The solution is founded on a free mediating service that you can use to sync both your mobile phone and Thunderbird. The one I found that has both phone and Thunderbird compatibility for both contacts and calendar entries is ScheduleWorld.
Now that I have this sorted out – I have encountered another obstacle. I have grown somewhat accustomed to some of the search features provided by Xobni (which I have installed on Outlook). Xobni compensates for Outlook’s meek search features (amongst other things). I will miss these features in Thunderbird – so again the migration is on hold – but I believe it is a matter of time!