I love it, when a plan comes together. I like it even more, when the technology works, and it's free, too! Long story short, I solved a major headache that I was having. I had multiple email accounts, multiple IO systems, and a calendar on one device that was synchronized to nothing.
The multiple email accounts happened, when a throw-away account landed in a printed directory that folks started using to message me. A second throw-away account inherited new features that I found useful, and a third account became necessary for business reasons. My IO devices included multiple PC's, an iPhone, an iPad, and an occasional web kiosk. I needed an email client that would read multiple accounts, integrate well with IMAP servers, have calendar functionality, and allow remote synching across all the devices.
My first find was the Mozilla Thunderbird client. It does all sorts of wonderful things with multiple email accounts. The calendar add-on, Lightning, was my second discovery. Finally, I found Provider for Lightning that addresses the issue of calendar connectivity with Google calendars. Without going into the gory installation and set-up details (it was relatively easy), the end-result is email and a calendar that is easily managed across devices. For example, I now have tabbed email for the different inboxes, and I can create a calendar event on any of my devices and have the event appear everywhere I need it.
To top it off, the product icons are pretty cool, too.
