

Warn HN: Google Calendar is not reliable - cool-RR

I've been using Google Calendar for a few years now.<p>I've been relying mainly on its "alerting" options -- For example if there's something important I'm supposed to do two months from now, I would set an event for that time with an e-mail alert, and then I'll get an e-mail from Calendar reminding me of that.<p>I was very happy that there is some service I can write things down in and then completely forget them, trusting it will alert me by e-mail.<p>Well... Lately I've been suspecting that Calendar is simply dropping e-mails occasionaly. Sometimes there will be an event and I won't get an e-mail. For a while I thought I was missing something, maybe I didn't set the e-mail alert right, or deleted the e-mail and forgot.<p>But it kept happenning, and today I confirmed it. I made a reminder and made sure everything was set up right, and then I didn't receive the e-mail, and I also checked the spam folder. I'm pretty sure it was just not mailed.<p>So be warned: You cannot trust Google Calendar to alert you to your important events.
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macemoneta
Email is not a guaranteed delivery protocol. Messages get dropped if any
server in the path has a problem. With 80+% of email being spam, it's also
possible that an aggressive filter on your ISP or an intermediate machine is
selecting the messages incorrectly. Treating email as a reliable protocol does
not make it so.

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cool-RR
No ISP involved -- It's all in-Google.

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stcredzero
If it's all in-house Google, there's no reason why they can't develop some
sort of guaranteed delivery protocol, just for internal use. That would be a
huge boon to a calendaring app with notification.

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mahmud
I think about 5 googlers just got yanked from their fun 20% projects into a
meeting room.

Yes, of course!

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kirubakaran
That IS scary. I too rely on Google Calendar completely. Thank you for the
alert. From now, perhaps I'll check the 'agenda view' first thing in the
morning every day.

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azsromej
I've had problems, but only with recurring events; I wasn't getting reminders
for those so I made them one-time events and dragged them to a future date
upon notification.

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BigCanOfTuna
I agree with the others. There are too many variable to the situation to
simply assume that you can't trust Google. Now, I don't doubt that have
dropped emails as you suggest, but at a rate that is worse than Exchange or
any other calendaring applications?

Perhaps your title should be "Google Calendar is not perfect" and we could all
respond with "What is?"

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cool-RR
Dude, have you read my comments to all the people below? This is ALL GOOGLE.
The alerts go from my Google Calendar to Gmail, and I read them from the
browser.

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zmimon
The nice thing about Google Calendar is it supports iCal and various other
standard protocols to get your calendar out. You can even import it to Windows
Calendar. So you are not limited to relying on Google for updates, just set up
synching with any service or application that supports iCal and configure that
application to give you alerts.

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cool-RR
Also, I would be very happy to hear a recommendation about an alerting service
that you _can_ trust.

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JamieEi
Um, Outlook does a pretty good job.

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abyssknight
That it does, and with Exchange (gasp) its amazing what you can do. Vendor
agnosticism is a virtue. Remember that. :) I <3 exchange, but I'll agree its
expensive.

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k0n2ad
There are too many points on the path where something could go wrong. Given
that this is the first time that I am hearing about Google Calendar being a
problem, I doubt it's the actual problem. What email service are you using?

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newsio
I use Google Calendar alerts and have regularly noticed late email
notifications (up to an hour or two), but never failed deliveries. I use Yahoo
mail.

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cool-RR
Possibly you don't use it as heavily as me, I have maybe ~5 reminders a day.

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gizmo
Use the SMS notification feature. It's free and in my experience 100%
reliable.

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cool-RR
Been using the SMS alerts for years as well - It's much LESS reliable than the
e-mail alerts for me, with SMSs being dropped all the time, but this is
probably because of my phone company which is in Israel, so I won't hold it
against Google and this is why I did not mention it at all in this complaint.

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subd
Be double sure and set up an SMS & email reminder & confirm that Google
calendar forgot about it altogether, or just that something went wrong with
the email somewhere

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prakash
Kiko resurrection?

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vgurgov
are you using gmail mailbox for that??? i also had issues with local mailbox
but gmail+googcal pair works fine for me.

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cool-RR
Yes, Gmail. What do you mean, "works fine" for you? In more than 95% of the
time it works fine for me too, I'm just concerned about it not being close
enough to 100%.

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blueben
Yes, I can see how this might trouble you. I mean, you've paid good money for
a 100% performance SLA.

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chanux
30boxes does good enough for me.

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senorpedro
use rememberthemilk.com

its very reliable, also it can remind you via IM or SMS

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drhowarddrfine
Well, I've been using Google Calendar for several years now, too, and have
always received my alerts, afaik.

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peregrine
Same here never had an issue.

