#define TB Thunderbird

• Step 1: Make Gmail labels play nice with IMAP done
  • Observation: they can be made to play very nice
    • Gmail relies entirely on labels for mailbox organization and tries to map them to IMAP folders, instead of just doing both folders and labels as prescribed in IMAP, so using labels as intended breaks PIMs and results in duplicated emails
      • Solution: hide problematic built-in labels (Important, Starred, All Mail) from IMAP, make sure every email has only one label
        • Moving mail around in the PIM mostly works
        • Gmail's idea of archiving an email is simply removing the Inbox label, not touching any other labels - useful for when something breaks and a bunch of mail ends up in both Inbox and a label
    • some label names (e.g. Drafts, Archive) are reserved, and creating a reserved-name IMAP folder makes Gmail prefix its name with [Imap]/
      • Solution: don't care - Gmail is smart enough to hide the prefix from IMAP, so this is only a problem on my phone, and even then I don't intend to organize my mail on my phone
    • Gmail-provided folders act weird, beyond the email duplication thing
      • Can't create subfolders in [Gmail]
      • Creating a subfolder in Inbox results in a label whose name is prefixed with INBOX/
        • If we're not really supposed to make Inbox subfolders then why the hell is Inbox not in [Gmail]?
        • Better yet, why even have [Gmail]? Why not put Drafts and Sent Mail and Spam Junk and Trash in the root like every other email provider ever does?
  • Nuclear solution: switch to a standards-compliant email etc. provider
  • Nuclear not-a-solution: use POP and stop worrying about how Google thinks I should organize my mailbox
  • Step 1.5: Tidy up the clusterfuck that is my email hoard
    • Do something with this .pst of mine that's been collecting dust somewhere in the cloud for years and put its contents back in Gmail done - MailStore my beloved
      • Aaaaand it only goes back to 2017, not 2010 as I hoped
    • Move all unlabeled mail back to Inbox (or Sent Mail - I may have clicked "archive" on my own mail) done
    • Do something about all the duplicated mail from when I didn't know how labels work (optional) who cares, I'll deal with saving space iff I run out of space
    • Move (unimportant) mail from Inbox to topical archive folders
      • 11K items in Inbox as of latest revision (down from 23464 back when I created this gist). Ultimate goal is probably not zero but some very low value (<3K?)
      • Clicking "Archive" is cheating - if it's not in Inbox, it must be in an appropriate folder fuck it, I'm close to having too many folders and the only way to fix that without deleting anything is a generic archive button
      • I should click more unsubscribe buttons to get less mail to begin with
    • Learn how to quickly move mail from Inbox to specific folders drag-and-drop, TB's "File" button, filters
    • Somehow get control over Gmail's spam filter doesn't seem possible
• Step 2: calendar.google is good and all, now get used to the PIM's calendar done, Thunderbird my beloved
  • Observation 1: Having multiple personal calendars breaks everything and is stupid in hindsight, and I need to merge them into one works just fine once I get through setup (unless it turns out Gcal can't do multi-calendar free-busy)
    • Should still merge some old unused calendars into the main calendar so that there's less clutter done
  • Observation 2: iCalendar+CalDAV (?) on Gcal is more janky than IMF+IMAP on Gmail
    • Evolution can't change attendance for individual occurrences of recurring events, have to open calendar.google
      • Not attempted in TB yet, not optimistic about it
      • Solution: open calendar.google for this, cope
    • Per-event colors don't work because Google can't be bothered to notice RFC 7986
      • Not sure how calendar colors work when event colors don't
      • Changing an event's color on calendar.google doesn't change its color on Evolution
      • Can't set event colors at all in Evolution?????
      • Not attempted in TB yet TB outright doesn't support event colors - labels show up as a little tag next to each event and of course they don't sync to Gcal
        • Bright labels (e.g. #FF0000) still stand out and draw attention among a sea of black and purple events creating more calendars works better
      • Solution: seethe, create ad hoc calendars and merge them into the main one when I'm done
    • Creating an .ics for a scheduled meeting in Zoom and then importing it to the PIM doesn't make the meeting show up with a dedicated "join Zoom meeting" button on Gcal
      • Why the hell do I need a Gcal-specific footer for this?
      • At least putting in the meeting link as the location makes it work as an actual link
      • Solution: ^
    • calendar.google allows creating special types of events like first-come-first-serve appointment schedules and out-of-office intervals, which do fun things like auto-declining conflicting invitations and allowing people to schedule appointments all by themselves and having Slack etc. display statuses other than "in a meeting". Of course, none of this works with PIMs because Google can't think of using custom iCalendar fields like X-GOOGLE-EVENT-TYPE or something
      • Not that PIMs (Evolution at least) even allow adding arbitrary fields
      • Solution: mald, avoid needing special event types, open calendar.google when one is necessary, work at a place that took all the Microsoft pills and makes me use Outlook and on-prem Exchange
• Step 3: Figure out wth a Google Contacts is and how it relates to Gmail and Gcal figured out
  • It's just my phonebook, according to Google
    • Dear fucking Sirin it's an even worse mess than my mailbox
      • At the same time it's much more manageable since there are far fewer contacts than emails
  • The point is to allow autocompleting addresses when writing emails and inviting people to events
  • Having too little free space on my phone breaks sync for some reason
  • Step 3.5: Tidy up the thing
    • Step 3.25: Upgrade to TB 102 first done
      • All-new fancy-ass address book UI that I bet pissed off someone who misses Netscape Communicator! Poggers!
    • Remove garbage contacts (duplicates, non-people whom I talked to once and probably won't talk to ever again, etc.)
      • Idea: Export everything done, then delete everything done, then start over
    • Figure out which Gcontacts field to which TB contact field actually does this really matter when TB only cares about email addresses and Gcal handles reminding me of people's birthdays etc.?
    • Add FAR more details to each contact (email addresses, [insert online platform here] usernames, birthdays, etc.)
      • Hopefully arbitrary fields work properly so that I can add my brother's Discord to his contact for the heck of it they don't xd - not sure whether it's Google's fault or TB's
• Step 4: Connect the PIM's task list to Google's, then make them behave the exact same done, kind of
  • Evolution works out-of-the-box
  • TB works with an add-on called Provider for Google Calendar
  • Neither allow setting due times, only due dates, because Google is too pretentious to support iCalendar properly
    • I feel like the default task list should also be not separate from the default calendar when iCalendar allows a calendar to contain both normal events and to-dos
      • But then tasks.google.com wouldn't return 404 if Gtasks wasn't a complete afterthought
• Step 5: Figure out what else a PIM can/should do
  • Memos?
    • Don't care; dedicated notetaking apps and word processors exist and work far better than PIM memos, plus Google Keep doesn't have PIM memo sync for some reason, plus TB doesn't have memos anyway, plus is there even a standard that isn't raw WebDAV that would allow memo sync?
      • Yes, apparently. Now I'm extra pissed that there's no competent mainstream implementation of digital calendar standards
    • Fucking Notepad/KWrite/gedit/nano
  • RSS/Atom feeds?
    • Not sure how any PIM can top my browser's feed extension when TB can't
    • Vivaldi might be able to do it better, being a Swiss Army chainsaw of a "browser"
  • Usenet?
    • TB is the only PIM with NNTP support that I know of, and it somewhat sucks at filtering, trying to apply the same filtering system to both mail and newsgroups (which only works well for mail)
      • But this suckful filtering works just fine for me, so whatever. I'll use a real newsreader iff I need to
  • Weather???
    • Only useful on PIMs that have a dashboard that summarizes everything (e.g. # of unread emails, # of events scheduled for the day)
      • Like Kontact
      • And Outlook (now why is the Summary button hidden away on a PIM literally named "Outlook"?)
      • And Vivaldi, I bet, through some newtab magic
      • And TB I guess? Selecting a top-level mailbox in the email tab gives a "setup more shit" screen that looks like a dashboard
        • I bet there's an add-on to make that screen useful couldn't find one
    • I have my phone for this

An awful lot of the problems listed here would be gone if I had the will to bail out of Gmail & company.

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