Baikal as calendar server

Calendar and Tasks

Like a lot of people, I’ve been more or less stuck with some parts of the Google ecosystem ever since the Gmail Beta times (an era when Gmail was truly an exciting turn of events as opposed to POP3). But over time, like many people, I became unhappy with the fact that Google was mining Gmail messages for data to help them deliver more targeted ads so I moved over to a custom solution where I run a box with Postfix and handle my emails myself. I understand it’s not something everybody want or can do but for me, it’s more than anything fun and hobby to keep my mail server in a good shape (and I’m learning new stuff all the time as more requirements come in such as DMARC).

But besides email, I’ve still been using the Google ecosystem for calendars and tasks. Now, the Google tasks, those are fairly simple and easy to use as long as you use browser or phone. But I was wondering recently if there was a better way to handle simple tasks in the context of Thunderbird, which is my preferred email tool. There are some Google connectors for Thunderbird out there, they mostly work for calendars and tasks but I’ve run into some weird stuff as well, like when a Google Calendar add-on in Thunderbird removed all attendees in all events created by me, which was not nice. So I haven’t really been using anything that would bridge the Google suite and Thunderbird.

Anyway, I thought there must be some other way to have a list of tasks that would work in Thunderbird and could be synchronized across multiple devices. As usual, it took me some time to look around but eventually I ran into https://sabre.io/baikal/

Baikal is a CalDAV/CardDAV server with support for tasks. It’s an opensource project maintained mostly by a company that’s offering additional services on top of this and some other components. But you can host standalone Baikal on your own, which is something I did. Now I’m hosting the data of my own calendars and tasks on my own hardware and it’s all synchronized across multiple laptops and Android devices. It works great and I can definitely recommend it.