Tuesday, March 4, 2008

Claws Mail goes OpenSync - progress report

It's been a while since my initial announcement of the Claws Mail - OpenSync connection. Addressbook and calendar synchronisation are a pretty important topic for me. I hate trying to keep all those addressbooks or calendar events on PDAs or cell phones in sync manually. It is a lot of hassle - and ultimately just doesn't work.

The OpenSync guys came up with a pretty well thought-out synchronisation framework that sounded interesting enough to invest some rainy Saturday afternoons and hook up Claws Mail with it.

Now that contact synchronisation is going better and better, I decided to make my hands dirty on calendar events as well. Colin, being the author of Claws Mail's vCalendar plugin, helped me out and implemented part of my calendar interface wishlist in the vCalendar plugin. As a result, one-way syncs of calendar events from Claws Mail to OpenSync counterparts are possible.

As a proof of concept, let's use a Claws Mail / EDS sync group to show upcomming calendar events in the GNOME clock:


It's far from being complete (and even farther from being usable), but it's an encouraging progress.

Hosting moved to github. There's one repository for the OpenSync plugin for Claws Mail, and another repository for the Claws Mail plugin for OpenSync. You'll need both if you want to try this out. Also, the plugin for OpenSync requires a pretty recent (probably svn) version of OpenSync up and running.