I just love my friends in the programming community. They're always showing me new and useful tools that I'd never have located otherwise.

The latest one (thanks to Ed) is called Spicebird. It's similar to the better-known Thunderbird, Mozilla's popular email program, but even more complete. Spicebird is "...your one platform for many collaboration needs. It provides e-mail, calendaring and instant messaging with intuitive integration and unlimited extensibility."

And it's all open source, which means it's free!

Spicebird was created by a group called Synovel Technologies, "an opensource technology startup based in Hyderabad, India. We develop and contribute to Free and Open Source applications, especially in the enterprise communication and collaboration space."

Spicebird is a collection of contact and collaboration tools, including Chat, Email, Calendar, Tasks and Contacts.

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