Frustrated With Calendars

Ok, so I totally skipped writing last week. My bad.

I dumped Outlook a while ago. It did a great job with my mail, and it had a lot of cool categorization and productivity features (although a good portion of them would take a two-week training course to use), but it really just ran too slow for my liking, and it had a tendency to kind of go nuts sometimes and just not work.

I switched to Windows Live Mail (beta), and I love the interface, and it’s so simple without all the dozens of features that I really have no intention of using. I’ve run into two problems with the client, and I am frustrated because I *love* the way it handles the stuff it handles and really don’t want to switch.

The first is really a minor problem, and there’s no easy solution without switching to another mail/calendar client. It doesn’t have a to-do list built in. I know, I never used the to-do list in Outlook, but recently I have found myself setting goals, and lining up simple tasks that I want to have done at certain times. I can load tasks into the calendar, but it’s just not the same as having a dedicated “this is what I need to do” list.

The second problem is the calendar. This is the part where I get frustrated. The calendar in Windows Live Mail is (assuming you have linked your email account to a Live Account, as I have) automatically synchronized with your Windows Live Calendar and across all Windows Live Mail clients you have on all your computers. Sweet, right? Well, yes, except that there’s no easy way to sync that from there to my BlackBerry, or to Google Calendar, which I can then sync to my BlackBerry.

This problem is big enough that I am considering changing mail clients, despite the fact that I really love the one I’m using right now. Any suggestions on mail clients?

Final thought: Does anyone actually read my blog, or is it just the four people who read the Facebook note after it syncs mysteriously at 3:57 AM six days after I write a post, only one of which makes a comment?