Context: was looking for a decent service to give me a calendar a little while back but one thing that kept stopping me is there seems to be absolutely no service that just offers you a nice calendar, its only email services that happen to offer a calendar on the side.
I don’t want another email. I have enough, and my current one is tied down to gmail (but I’d prefer if my calendar wasn’t).
I’m sure there must a historical reason for this, but also why is does it still persevere?
One is a scheduling and time management thing, the other a communication system. I don’t need to sign up for a messaging app to have a todo list.
The two aren’t even well integrated smh.
Mainly because email is used so heavily for scheduling. For example, I emailed my tattoo artist back and forth a ton recently then they sent me a calendar invite that automatically got added for my shared calendar
I recently tried to get away from outlook as my primary email / calendar. Tried a couple of different providers only to discover just how reliant I am on having seamless calendar invites.
Manually attaching .ICS files to email was not going to cut it. No matter how good caldav is for my phone to desktop, I need to easily make events / respond to them.
I’d suggest Google because they integrate calendar, email, chat, teleconference, and mapping pretty well. But, that’s kinda like jumping from the frying pan into the fire. Shared calendars do honestly work alot better in Google than anything using Outlook though.
Indeed it would be. I’ve recently degoogled by installing Graphene on my phone too.
I’d never really used my gmail account for email or calendar previously anyway as I never liked it from the start. It’s just what my android’s have been tied to.
You can also host your own, check out radicale! Is quite simple.
thought about it, not sure it’s worth it. Also, would have to use python
Probably because that’s how most people know it from work. There it comes from Microsoft Exchange, Lotus Notes (I think) and Gmail.
Personally I have my calendars on my own Nextcloud instance. That’s mainly for files. But I use that anyways, so getting calendars, contacts and passwords was a nice bonus.
The biggest reason they’ve been tightly coupled historically has been event notifications and invitations. It’s a lot easier for one email client to both create the event in the calendar, and send the event metadata (.ics file) to the invitees.
Nowadays, it’s honestly much simpler to have them entirely separate, at least for personal use. My partner and I use a shared NextCloud calendar which works well on both iOS and Android using CalDAV. Much simpler than Google/microsoft/icloud’s sharing options.
Hi, fruux.com is what you’re looking for.
Most email services allow you to forward mail to other addresses, and download all your mail to move it to another provider.