CalDAV and CardDAV 101

CalDAV and CardDAV are application layer computer network protocols that enable users to synchronize and manage their calendar (CalDAV) and contact (CardDAV) data across multiple devices and platforms. These open standards protocols leverage the (World Wide Web Distributed Authoring and Versioning) protocol, which provides a framework for users to create, change, and move documents on…

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Synchronizing Thunderbird Calendar with Apple iCloud Calendar

Thunderbird is a nice email client and calendar management software. iCloud calendar is the native calendar cloud service in Apple devices such as iPhone. So far there is no native support from Thunderbird to support iCloud calendar, excepting reading the read-only public iCloud calendars which has privacy concerns as long as lacks of editing functionalities….

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Configuring Fonts for Thunderbird snap to Display Fonts Nicely

snap is a software app bundle with dependencies included so that it can works in different Linux distributions. However, as most other software, snap has compatiblity issues. An app in the snap format is not 100% the same and compatible with the native version. One of the problem I find is that Thunderbird from snap…

Synchronizing Thunderbird Calendar and Address Book with Office365 Exchange Online using ActiveSync

Thunderbird is a nice email client available on Linux and Windows. With the Lightning plugin, Thunderbird can support calendar functions well. Exchange is a widely used email and calendar/address book service software. Office 365 provide the cloud version of Exchange named Office 365 Exchange Online. Although Exchange Online provide IMAP for synchronizing emails, it provides…

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Thunderbird Addons to Make Thunderbird Easier to Use

Thunderbird is powerful and feature rich. But different users have different needs and it is not feasible to include all features into the base software, where a plugin system shines. Thunderbird, similar to Firefox from Mozilla, supports addons/plugins and has a large ecosystems. Here, we will introduce several addons to Thunderbird that make Thunderbird easier…

Hiding Private IP from Email Headers in Thunderbird

It seems Thunderbird sends out my private/lan IP to the SMTP server. For example, in an Email sent out by Thunderbird, the header contains Received: from [192.168.1.2] (example.com [1.2.3.4]) by mail.example.com (Postfix) with ESMTPSA id 92CD297DEA; It is fine that the SMTP server records the public IP (1.2.3.4) as it is what it sees. But…

How to enable Email address auto completion in Evolution?

Does Evolution support automatic email address filling/completing in the “To” or “CC” fields which is commonly seen in other Email clients such as Thunderbird. Is is possible and how to enable Email address auto completion in Evolution? Evolution supports the contact autocompletion. To enable it, do as follows in Evolution. In Evolution Preferences dialog, in…

Finding All Available Versions of a Package in Ubuntu

How to find all available versions of a package in Ubuntu? To list available versions of a package: apt-cache showpkg <package-name> For example, to check all versions of thunderbird: $ sudo apt-cache showpkg thunderbird Package: thunderbird Versions: 1:31.1.1+build1-0ubuntu0.14.04.1 (/var/lib/apt/lists/archive.ubuntu.com_ubuntu_dists_trusty-updates_main_binary-amd64_Packages) (/var/lib/apt/lists/security.ubuntu.com_ubuntu_dists_trusty-security_main_binary-amd64_Packages) Description Language: File: /var/lib/apt/lists/archive.ubuntu.com_ubuntu_dists_trusty_main_binary-amd64_Packages MD5: 68ed1001b79d708ad48956a0c129114d Description Language: en File: /var/lib/apt/lists/archive.ubuntu.com_ubuntu_dists_trusty_main_i18n_Translation-en MD5: 68ed1001b79d708ad48956a0c129114d 1:31.0+build1-0ubuntu0.14.04.1 (/var/lib/dpkg/status)…

How to export and import message filters of Thunderbird

I have several installation of Thunderbird under Linux to check/send emails using IMAP email servers. I use filters extensively to manage my emails. How to export and import message filters of Thunderbird so that I can synchronize the rules on several installations? About message filters in Thunderbird (More at http://kb.mozillazine.org/Filters_(Thunderbird)): Filters are account specific, there…

Plain text file pipelined to Linux mailx turns to “Content-Type: application/octet-stream” (an attachment)

Plain text file pipelined to Linux mailx turns to “Content-Type: application/octet-stream” which is recognized as an attachment by some email client. The command is like this: $ cat log.txt | mail -s “Updated log file” -r “from@example.com” “to@example.com” I expect it to be: Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit But it turns out to be: Content-Type:…

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Synchronizing home directories

Any good tools to synchronize home directories on Linux boxes? Many have several PC/laptops and consequently many home directories. There is home directory synchronizing problem. unison is a good tool to do this: http://www.cis.upenn.edu/~bcpierce/unison/download/releases/stable/unison-manual.html#rshmeth http://www.watzmann.net/blog/2009/02/my-homedirs-in-unison.html http://www.cis.upenn.edu/~bcpierce/papers/index.shtml#File%20Synchronization Useful script: $ unison -batch -ui text ./ /mnt/homebak/zma/ In text user interface, synchronizing two directories in batch mode…

Chrome does not work with ibus

Seems the input method on Linux (ibus) does not work well with Chrome. But other programs, e.g. thunderbird, has not problem with ibus at all. What’s wrong with Chrome or ibus? Check whether the “Qt IBus library and Qt input method plugin” is installed. If not, installing it and restarting ibus may help: # yum…

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Moving Junk Emails to Junk Folder Automatically in Thunderbird

Junk Emails, or Email spams, are annoying and they cost time to deal with. While they are something we need to cope with, we can use tools to help us. Thunderbird has an adaptive junk filter that can learn from user’s actions to identify junk messages. I find that Thunderbird default settings are not fully…