lun. 03 octobre 2022

It's decided, I'm fed up with Google and equivalent commercial of emails and other PIMs (Personnal Info Managers). I need to share calendars, contacts, etc with my family and Google solution seemed to be promising. In fact, it perfectly worked for several years but, since one year, I encounter some problems with my local clients.

Since the support of Thunderbird is discontinued, I cannot use Lightning anymore. So I migrate to Evolution (I'm currently using Linux Mint distribution with Gnome desktop). A great piece of software I used long time ago and that I give up as it was not following evolution (specially to use Google solution). All seems to work nicely until July. Then I switched to a more up-to-date version of Evolution using Flatpak and it worked like a charm. But today again, connections to Google fail unexpectedly and I have no other solution than using the web interface to access my emails, my agenda and my contacts and I feel I reached the breakpoint: I definitively need a more sustainable solution my personnal information.

I was not very confortable with Google's solution but a good point was it was working. Now, I want a long-term and open source solution and this blog aims to present my action to set up an open source to this problem, perhaps to help other user to get their freedom with their personnal information data. Not sure this process will be successful but I will try my best.

First, I want my solution to be hosted at home (to have complete control on my personnal data):

• first, I have a Raspberry Pi to use as a lower power server,
• the Linux distribution will be one Debian or derived,
• a fixed IP ensured by my internet provided (Free in France).

I have to explorer the different alternative:

• for email server,
• for PIM server,
• for authentification (presumably LDAP).

And for this blog, I will use Pelican because I like (1) static website generator, (2) text tools and (3) Python that runs almost everywhere.

Category: EHome