
Feature Request: Manual Refresh of external calendar feeds - baptou12
https://productforums.google.com/forum/#!topic/calendar/iXp8fZfgU2E;context-place=topicsearchin/calendar/ical
======
kazinator
Google doesn't care that the Picassa system's servers are used for bouncing
spam. The spam arrives with a from-envelope address of "<random-id>@photos-
server.bounces.google.com". This has been going on for years and reported to
Google repeatedly. They don't give a damn.

I bet you my e-mail server has caught this recently. Let's see:

    
    
      # zgrep photos /var/log/exim4/rejectlog*
      /var/log/exim4/rejectlog.17.gz:2016-07-24 04:34:41 H=mail-qk0-f201.google.com [209.85.220.201] F=<3y6eUVwYUADANRSTQeNRSTQe.kkPQeeM.ebMOQ@photos-server.bounces.google.com> rejected RCPT <ada-mp1-request@kylheku.com>: Too many components in domain name
      [... snip, a number of hits going back to May ... ]
    

There we go: the most recent spam attempt was on July 24, 2016. Someone tried
to use Picassa to spam my ADA MP-1 mailing list.

So _that 's_ how I'm catching this stuff now: my rule against too many
components in the sender domain is taking care of it, currently, before
anything more specific.

Here is one 2012-dated discussion about this:

[https://productforums.google.com/forum/#!topic/gmail/bQd_kZl...](https://productforums.google.com/forum/#!topic/gmail/bQd_kZlscFE)

It goes back before that, though, to at least 2010.

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AdmiralAsshat
So, much fun as it is to bash Google, this _is_ a feature request. They're not
obligated to implement a free enhancement on any sort of timetable.

This isn't like when Google actually broke the telephony in the Nexus 4 and
then finally closed the issue with a middle finger:
[https://code.google.com/p/android/issues/detail?id=82949](https://code.google.com/p/android/issues/detail?id=82949)

------
jjnoakes
You get what you pay for.

My calendar on my phone routinely forgets to remind me, even though clearly
the entry says "remind me 1 hour before" and other events with the same
reminders work fine.

Are there any good calendar hosting companies where I could pay a few $$ a
month for decent features, bug fixes, and service?

~~~
mark_l_watson
5 minutes ago my FastMail calendar sent me an email reminding me of a dental
appointment tomorrow morning. FastMail in general seems reliable (except for
the long outage they had 3 years ago).

~~~
jjnoakes
Thanks, I'll look in to it. Hopefully reminders come in forms other than
email, there's a decent android app, and I can access an exported ical format
programatically for backup purposes.

~~~
brerlapn
Fastmail is quite reliable, and they support CalDAV and CardDAV. Their android
email client is fast but doesn't work offline--fortunately they support IMAP
Push and work very well with whatever 3rd party email client you prefer. I
haven't moved my personal domain over there yet, but I've been using a paid
tier for several emails with them for over 10 years and have been very happy.
I haven't tried the exported ical format programmatically, but some of their
devs are active on HN and if you shoot their help desk a question about it I
expect they'll get back to you promptly.

------
scholia
How can this not get fixed after 10 years? You'd have to assume that googlers
use their own Calendar, so why aren't they out with pitchforks to incentivize
the programmers? Do the in-house Calendar feeds get refreshed every hour or
so?

~~~
nevir
It's probably a real pain in the ass to fix - with some dumb tech debt reasons
why.

But, what's probably contributing the most to it is how Google incentivizes
people internally. The promotion process is tied very heavily towards
launching new features.

Maintaining existing products is (often) a bit of a career dead end for
Googlers. It's safer to chase some new and shiny feature.

------
simonsarris
Reminds me of what's going on right now in Chrome:

[https://bugs.chromium.org/p/chromium/issues/detail?id=608016...](https://bugs.chromium.org/p/chromium/issues/detail?id=608016#c53)

~~~
adt2bt
For all of us HN readers, backspace to go back made intuitive sense from the
first time we accidentally hit backspace years ago. However, I imagine for
every one of us, there are tens of folks who use computers sparingly and get
confused when hitting backspace takes them to a wholly different page. In the
end, this might make chrome easier to use for the common man at the expense of
a tiny performance hit for power users.

~~~
FreeFull
I'm a user of Firefox, and have backspace to go back disabled, due to having
accidental navigation happen way too many times. When I do want to go back, I
can always press alt+left

~~~
patates
Problem is that you can't press alt+left with one hand. Backspace wasn't
reliable but at least it worked when you tabbed away from any active inputs.

~~~
Someone1234
You can use alt+left with one hand, just use the right hand alt key.

~~~
FreeFull
Many keyboard layouts have altgr instead of a right alt key, and it won't work
for this.

------
apatters
My mind was blown when I discovered this little gem recently:

[http://www.computerhope.com/unix/ucalande.htm](http://www.computerhope.com/unix/ucalande.htm)

Place a text file at ~/.calendar/calendar with one event per row, containing
the date and the title separated by a tab. Type calendar and you'll get a list
of what's coming up in the next few days. You're done.

Being a venerable UNIX utility there are of course a variety of options
(switch to view X days in the future, support for including external
calendars, support for recurrence, etc.). Weirdly, it lacks any concept of
start and end time, but this is easy enough to simply include in your
appointment's title. And no free/busy or special sharing mechanism (though you
could certainly compose your calendar of several files and expose them on a
web server easily enough).

It's not about to replace a full-blown calendar app for power users, but if
you're the type of person who has a fairly light meeting schedule and spends a
lot of time in a terminal... I was immediately done with all other calendar
software and consequently all the problems of said software when I stumbled
across this thing.

~~~
leephillips
Even better is "remind":
[https://www.roaringpenguin.com/products/remind](https://www.roaringpenguin.com/products/remind)

------
rietta
It's the cult of the API.

I have personal experience with this. Because of the lack of reliable iCal
sync, a project I worked on had to spend over a week and a half of developer
hours implementing, troubleshooting, and maintaining Google Calendar API
integration for our users. It's the source of no shortage of pain for this app
as it is a sideline feature, but has just enough demand that Google
integration cannot be dropped.

Google doesn't want to support iCal because they want to have everyone use
their API.

~~~
Artemis2
Same for IMAP being deprecated in favor of the Gmail API, which gives access
to many more features.

~~~
Jtsummers
For clarification:

What does the Gmail API add over IMAP?

------
thinkpad20
Github has a similar thing, a issue which has been open for over three years
and has received innumerable upvotes[0] with essentially no official response
as far as I can tell.

[0]:
[https://github.com/isaacs/github/issues/18](https://github.com/isaacs/github/issues/18)

------
tranv94
"I hope this can be resolved soon..."\- dawnjc79 4/17/12

poor guy

------
baptou12
I was just wondering why a feature as simple as this one with lots of demands
is still not implemented (or rejected). (6 years !!)

~~~
sdegutis
Pretty funny how an ambiguous date format ("1/5/10") led to two
interpretations of how long ago this was (6 or 10 years ago).

To clarify: at the time of initially writing this comment, there were only two
comments in this thread: the parent of this comment, which said it was 6 years
ago; and another, which said it was 10 years ago. I don't know or care whether
it was legitimate for either to come to the conclusion they did, I just
thought it was funny, and that it was most likely due to the super-short date
format inside the link. Can we move on please?

~~~
jjnoakes
How can 1/5/10 be interpreted as 10 years ago? The only two interpretations I
can think of are "January 5, 2010" and "May 1, 2010".

~~~
dragonwriter
I don't see where 10ya comes from, but DMY, MDY, and YMD, at least, are all
plausible interpretations.

~~~
jjnoakes
YMD is only plausible if the first number is 2-digits or 4-digits. How is "1"
a year? Unless we're talking about 1AD...

~~~
dragonwriter
> YMD is only plausible if the first number is 2-digits or 4-digits. How is
> "1" a year?

During the first decade of the 21st Century, I regularly encountered dates,
especially handwritten, with single digit years, because some people _first_
reduce to a two-digit year when writing dates, but then -- as with any other
number -- leave off leading zeros.

~~~
jjnoakes
The date in question ("1/5/10") was formatted by a computer, so hand-written
dates seem pretty far off topic.

But even ignoring that, I've never ever seen a single person write a single-
digit year. Not alone ("I graduated in 1" vs "I graduated in 2001"), not in
dates ("August 7, 1" vs "August 7, 2001"), not anywhere.

------
mark-r
Google is all about scale, and caring doesn't scale. This is part of their
DNA.

This might seem like a flippant comment, but it explains a lot of the
observations I've made of Google over the years.

------
raverbashing
Another funny Google problem. Backup via adb has been broken since 1.0.32.
Nobody cares
[https://code.google.com/p/android/issues/detail?id=208337](https://code.google.com/p/android/issues/detail?id=208337)

------
smhg
As someone who builds a scheduling product which offers an iCalendar feed for
Google Calendar (among others), I have to face this issue on a weekly basis.

The most plausible explanation I came up with (and what I tell my users) is
that Calendar is maintained by a small team in Switzerland for which this
isn't a priority. I don't blame anyone, if true. It might not be easy to fix
with little resources.

The fact that some feeds sync faster than others (Facebook events) and syncs
speed up as time passes, makes for a weird case.

Outlook.com or iCloud/iCal sync properly. One of those offer a way out for my
users if critical.

------
jeffrand
I think Google cares, but they're not communicating it very well. I would
hesitate before building a feature that might kick off a relatively
complicated process with a lot of external factors whenever a user wants. It
seems very complicated and without much positive benefit for the average user.

------
leephillips
Is this just a problem when subscribing to calendars published through Google?
In other words, if I host an iCal calendar on my own server, will subscribers
see changes immediately when they refresh their Google Calendar client?

------
TheLarch
They'd have a lot more clout if they were customers.

------
therealmarv
hey, other google users which are volunteers are answering all your questions.
You are not supposed to talk directly to Google! ;)

------
usmannk
Was this hidden from the front page?

------
sctb
The previous title, “Google just don't care” violates the guidelines by being
editorialized. Please use the original title unless it's misleading or
clickbait.

[https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html](https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html)

~~~
baptou12
Ok sorry :-)

