I use Gmail and Google Calendar heavily, via the web interface. I have been thinking about trying out Thunderbird and Lightning instead, to slowly migrate my life to less dependence on non-free software and services.
I believe I can try these pieces of software with my existing Gmail address and calendar data. Does anyone have experience with that, or know a good guide to setting them up?
However, I'm also interested in what a completely free life would look like.
I have my own domain, xrchz.net, which doesn't point anywhere. I also have an email address, ramana@member.fsf.org, which currently forwards to Gmail.
If I wanted to use ramana@xrchz.net or ramana@member.fsf.org as my primary email address, without using Google's mail services, how could I go about doing that?
Is there a good free and libre mail server I could use? Or what other options are there?
Similarly, where could I host my calendar so I could update it from any computer on the internet (including, say, my office computer and my phone), and also (less important) share it with certain other people?
I hope someone on list knows the answers to these questions :) I don't think they're difficult, but probably the information isn't concentrated in a single place because there's no company who wants everyone to switch to using "their libre services" (which may be a contradiction in terms, but maybe not given AGPL...)
Anyway, I'm curious but pretty technically confused at the moment.