Thunder/Lightning/Google
Reading some of my previous posts, I come to realize what an obnoxious person I really am. Apologies to those obliged to deal with me.
Geek posts serve us better. If you’re looking for a free email/calendaring solution with portable data and good client software, try Mozilla’s Thunderbird in combination with the Lightning and Google Provider plugins. Your Google Calendar data, from one or multiple calendars, is now integrated with your email in T-Bird. I think Google is going to win with this approach, making the data you share with Google open and free to toss around in other applications. You can still use the Google Calendar web interface, of course, which is what Jessica is still doing on the calendar that we keep for the family.
What’s nice about Lightning is, you could also add calendars from other data sources, or a local data source, and mashup your entire temporal reality. Or something like that.