Mail Clients

Since imip-agent is integrated with mail infrastructure defined by Internet standards, users can use any mail program that is capable of sending and receiving standards-based mail. However, it is recommended that MIME-capable mail programs are used in order to properly present messages produced by imip-agent. Since the MIME standards have been in existence since the 1990s, most commonly-used mail programs should work with imip-agent with few difficulties.

Meanwhile, mail clients that can understand and present calendar data are less common. The following Free Software programs have been tested with imip-agent:

Program

Remarks

Claws Mail

  • Supports basic scheduling

  • Does not support recurring events

  • Does not support the COUNTER scheduling method

  • Does not support free/busy exchange over e-mail

Kontact

  • Supports scheduling including methods like COUNTER

  • Supports recurring events

  • Seems to support free/busy exchange over e-mail (although not transparently) and over HTTP

  • Seems to require numerous libraries and KDE components, including the somewhat unpolished Akonadi system

Mozilla Thunderbird (with Lightning Calendar extension)
Also known as Icedove (and Iceowl) in Debian

  • Supports basic scheduling

  • Supports recurring events but has deficiencies with RDATE and PERIOD datetimes, causing variations from the basic event duration to be discarded

  • Does not support the COUNTER scheduling method

  • Does not support free/busy exchange over e-mail, but can be made to fetch free/busy data over HTTP

Notes

See RFC 5546 section 3.2.7 for details of the COUNTER scheduling method.