Warn HN: Google Calendar is not reliable

Posted by cool-RR on Tuesday December 15, 2009 @07:50AM
from the self-post dept.

I've been using Google Calendar for a few years now.

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.

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.

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.

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.

So be warned: You cannot trust Google Calendar to alert you to your important events.

( 29 comments | 16 points | on HN )

Re:Warn HN: Google Calendar is not reliable by macemoneta on Tuesday December 15, 2009 @08:26AM (#996402)

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.

[ Parent | on HN ]

Re:Warn HN: Google Calendar is not reliable by cool-RR on Tuesday December 15, 2009 @08:37AM (#996421)

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

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Re:Warn HN: Google Calendar is not reliable by stcredzero on Tuesday December 15, 2009 @09:17AM (#996478)

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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Re:Warn HN: Google Calendar is not reliable by mahmud on Tuesday December 15, 2009 @10:59AM (#996703)

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

Yes, of course!

[ Parent | on HN ]

Re:Warn HN: Google Calendar is not reliable by roundsquare on Tuesday December 15, 2009 @02:16PM (#997135)

It may not be guaranteed, but how many emails do you have dropped every day? If someone is missing an a day from some source, I'd think that its not a problem with the servers along the way but a problem with the source or destination.

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Re:Warn HN: Google Calendar is not reliable by kirubakaran on Tuesday December 15, 2009 @09:52AM (#996537)

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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Re:Warn HN: Google Calendar is not reliable by azsromej on Tuesday December 15, 2009 @10:05AM (#996571)

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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Re:Warn HN: Google Calendar is not reliable by BigCanOfTuna on Tuesday December 15, 2009 @08:52AM (#996441)

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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Re:Warn HN: Google Calendar is not reliable by cool-RR on Tuesday December 15, 2009 @08:54AM (#996447)

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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Re:Warn HN: Google Calendar is not reliable by zmimon on Tuesday December 15, 2009 @09:54AM (#996546)

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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Re:Warn HN: Google Calendar is not reliable by cool-RR on Tuesday December 15, 2009 @07:56AM (#996363)

Also, I would be very happy to hear a recommendation about an alerting service that you can trust.

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Re:Warn HN: Google Calendar is not reliable by JamieEi on Tuesday December 15, 2009 @09:15AM (#996475)

Um, Outlook does a pretty good job.

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Re:Warn HN: Google Calendar is not reliable by abyssknight on Tuesday December 15, 2009 @02:13PM (#997132)

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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Re:Warn HN: Google Calendar is not reliable by cool-RR on Tuesday December 15, 2009 @10:02AM (#996565)

Release the hounds.

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Re:Warn HN: Google Calendar is not reliable by k0n2ad on Tuesday December 15, 2009 @08:32AM (#996407)

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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Re:Warn HN: Google Calendar is not reliable by cool-RR on Tuesday December 15, 2009 @08:36AM (#996419)

It doesn't even let you specify an email address -- It just sends to your associated Gmail account.

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Re:Warn HN: Google Calendar is not reliable by newsio on Tuesday December 15, 2009 @09:22AM (#996488)

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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Re:Warn HN: Google Calendar is not reliable by cool-RR on Tuesday December 15, 2009 @09:31AM (#996507)

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

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Re:Warn HN: Google Calendar is not reliable by gizmo on Tuesday December 15, 2009 @08:31AM (#996405)

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

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Re:Warn HN: Google Calendar is not reliable by cool-RR on Tuesday December 15, 2009 @08:56AM (#996450)

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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Re:Warn HN: Google Calendar is not reliable by subd on Tuesday December 15, 2009 @10:06AM (#996573)

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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Re:Warn HN: Google Calendar is not reliable by prakash on Tuesday December 15, 2009 @09:52AM (#996538)

Kiko resurrection?

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Re:Warn HN: Google Calendar is not reliable by vgurgov on Tuesday December 15, 2009 @08:32AM (#996410)

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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Re:Warn HN: Google Calendar is not reliable by cool-RR on Tuesday December 15, 2009 @08:39AM (#996423)

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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Re:Warn HN: Google Calendar is not reliable by blueben on Wednesday December 16, 2009 @08:10PM (#1000163)

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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Re:Warn HN: Google Calendar is not reliable by chanux on Tuesday December 15, 2009 @10:39AM (#996650)

30boxes does good enough for me.

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Re:Warn HN: Google Calendar is not reliable by senorpedro on Tuesday December 15, 2009 @10:22AM (#996604)

use rememberthemilk.com

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

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Re:Warn HN: Google Calendar is not reliable by drhowarddrfine on Tuesday December 15, 2009 @09:43AM (#996521)

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

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Re:Warn HN: Google Calendar is not reliable by peregrine on Tuesday December 15, 2009 @10:20AM (#996599)

Same here never had an issue.

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