The perfect email/calendar/contacts setup

[daniel1113]

Here's the deal:

I use Outlook for my email, calendar, and contacts so that I can easily synchronize my pocket PC and cell phone on a daily basis. However, I would like to have a web-based email system that contains the same email, calendar, and contact info. Free services like Gmail, Windows Live Mail, and Yahoo mail are all quite nice, and pretty much fill my needs, but they do not act as a proper single storage point that can be directly synchronized to my phone and PDA. Short of setting up my own personal Exchange server (or at least paying a monthly fee for Exchange email access), is there any simple (and preferably free) way to have a truly single storage point for my email, calendar, and contacts that can be accessed, updated, and synchronized to all of my devices?

 

[Skeeedunt]

I struggled with this for a while, here's where I ended up -

For email, I've been using an IMAP mail service for a couple years, and I'm very happy with that.

For calendaring, your options seem to be either Exchange server or iCal calendars on a WebDav/CalDav server (this appears to work ok in Thunderbird, didn't spend much time with it - never tried it in Outlook).

For contacts, other than exchange server, god only knows. The only real standard is LDAP, but from what I understood there was no way to control access to a web-accessible LDAP server (no user accounts or authentication) so your information would be out there for anyone who wanted it.

I ended up getting a pda phone, and I'm using that as my central store for calendaring and contacts (synced and backed up to pc). I always have it, so that's been good enough for me.

 

[13Gigatons]

Nothing simple that's free. Exchange works well but you need to pay for that.