vanilla Macs
I don't know if this is exactly what you had in mind. I use the built in Mail program and Palm desktop. I don't use iCal. I don't sync my mail to my Palm either. If I need a copy of an email, I try to dump it into a memo. There is a nice, free program called Note Taker, which can sync larger documents to the Palm. I use Mac Journal as my email archive. Anything I want to keep goes into an email archive journal, by use of the Services function.
I really don't have a lot of programs installed on my Mac. I have Tex-Edit plus, which I don't use that often. I do use iSilo quite a bit, to dump files onto my Palm. The built ins on the Mac are really good programs and suited towards a plain and simple system.