1y ago

Why are email and calendar so inextricably linked?

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.

44 comments

There's no protocol for different calendar apps to send one another invites directly. They use email for that, which means they need an email integration. Email has the advantage of having been standardized back in the '80s and '90s, with only a few minor modifications since then (mostly for spam prevention). So different companies' email systems have to work together. Calendars just layer on top of that compatibility.
- Calendar apps can communicate with each other over the mail protocol? Or are you just saying they integrated them to make it easier for people to email each other invites
  
  Your calendar app integrates with your email app. So when you create a calendar event and want to invite Bob to it, you can use your email contacts to find Bob. When you send the invite, it goes by email from your email system to Bob's. When Bob opens it, his email app asks him if he wants to add the event to his calendar.
  Your calendar app and Bob's calendar app never talk to each other directly, but you're still able to invite Bob to an event. Your calendar only talks to your email. Your email talks to your email service, which talks to Bob's email service. Bob's email client talks to Bob's email service and then to Bob's calendar.
  This is actually good. It means that anyone can switch to a different email or calendar app and all they have to do is update their contacts. People can use Hotmail or Gmail or Microsoft or self-hosted email, and integrate whatever calendar they like alongside it.
  
  Technically speaking, calendar apps don't really communicate with each other directly at all. It's the email systems that talk to the calendars.
  As fubo said, there's no protocol for a calendar function. Protocols are what apps used to talk to each other.
- you lost me at invites
  
  It's fine if you don't have a need for invites. But question was why are they integrated, and that's why. For work I'm sure I send or receive a calendar invite every day. If my calendar wasn't integrated with my mail client it would add a lot of friction to that process.

Stop thinking about what you want and think about what companies do for the answer.
You start a company to provide email service. You hire some developers and they craft the unique features for your email service. Once your email service is stable and secure, you don't just fire 9/10 of the staff and call it done? Email is enough for home users. But they don't like paying for email when every ISP out there gives it away for free. The bread and butter is business. They LOVE paying a small fee for every user. The size of that fee moves with services offered. All of a sudden, you're pushing your developers to offer Authentication, chat, calendar, file share, web serving, app development/hosting, directory services, video conferencing, VOIP phone service.
From a business standpoint, all these things things that seem like disparate services, tie together very well as you have entire teams that use the services in a coordinated fashion.
From your standpoint, you just want a calendar. But no one is going to pay someone to host a calendar for them. There's not enough signal intelligence in just a calendar to make selling your data worth it, so you have to choose from a package.
- Tech giants basically. But that doesn't mean every company goes this way. There are plenty of companies for like todo lists. Or notes. Or messaging. Or any of the 10 million sub-categories of productivity apps.
  They may not be popular but they are out there. For categories like notes there's dozens of them.
  Not calendars though, that seems to be the exception.
  
  All of the calendar providers also provide note taking apps :)
  Note taking apps aren't a solved problem. There's still a lot of innovation there. Most of the stand alone note taking apps that aren't providing an entire office suite have an angle that people are willing to pay for.
  Most Todo apps have an embedded calendar. and people will generally pay for organization software.
  It really just comes down to the fact that there aren't enough people willing to pay for a stand alone hosted calendar to make it a viable business, especially when they already have a calendar app build in to their email/office suite.

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.

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.
- But I use that anyways, so getting calendars, contacts and passwords was a nice bonus.
  This is how most people seem to think about this. And if it works out for you, great, I'm happy for you. But I don't think I need to explain to anyone here the evils of bundling.
  
  I know what you mean. But luckily with such an open platform it's trivial to migrate my data to other applications should the need arise.

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

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.

You say you just want a calendar, but how would you get the calendar entries? All self created? None coming in over email?
If yes, it sounds like you want a planner. You might have better luck looking up that as a keyword.
- I'm fine with getting invites or something, I don't quite understand why it has to be email. Why not just a link? When I share a google doc, it's not only over a email service of the same vendor, it's just a link I can send anywhere. That's the inextricable link.
  edit: they're just .ics files anyway aren't they?
  I looked up planners out of curiosity, but it just gives me paper planners or todo-list apps. Is there any specific service you were referring to?
  
  When I share a google doc, it's not only over a email service of the same vendor, it's just a link I can send anywhere.
  Well you're sending a link to a Google hosted service. The other side necessarily needs to interact with a Google service in order to make sense of that link, and, if they so choose, make edits directly in that Google service or export with Google's export functionality. If you send that link, a Microsoft Office user won't simply be able to open it in Microsoft Word (and even if Microsoft implements that functionality it would require Microsoft to actively maintain an API key with the Google service).
  If you're sharing a calendar entry between the current big 3 (Microsoft Outlook, Google Calendar, Apple Calendar), it sends an email to the other. From the users perspective, a Google user never has to interact with Apple's servers, or a Microsoft server (whether a local Exchange server or a cloud-based 365 one), because everything necessary comes to that users own server through a federated messaging service (email). You just send an invite to user@domain and it just works, but the protocols all simply assume that user@domain is an email address and that sending email to that address will cause the other user's email service to process and process that calendar invite for that user.

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

You can just use the Calendar apps on your phone and/or laptop. Etar is a good option for Android.
If you want synchronisation, you will either have to set up a calDAV based server yourself, or use someone else's. I use Nextcloud, and it synchronises many things, like calendar, contacts, tasks etc., using DAV protocol.
There are some public Nextcloud servers with server-side encryption that you can go for. Setting up your Nextcloud just for calender would be overkill. You may want to take a look at some awesome-selfhosted list, if you are into self-hosting.

I'm not sure what you're looking for; I use mailfence and it is OK with the calendar but not great. I am able to avoid google that way, tho. I did have issues with folks who do use google, but I am willing to work around that. I pay something like US$5 per year.

Really can't tell you where it came from, but which part of the google calendar integration with gmail doesn't work for you? I'm quite happy with that.
But have a look at tweek.so, they are a calendar & task planner without email service, and free for personal use.
- Honestly just trying to get away from google. I did actually use tweek for a bit, but in trying to combine email and tasks lists it ended up being a mediocre version of both, and I couldn't justify paying for that. Also it only worked with google calendar to work with others (idk if that's changed)
  
  Fastmail.com (referral link here for 10% off) has email, calendar, storage, notes and contacts, and has been working well for me. Better search and functionality than Proton.

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.

44 comments