I’m trying to de-Google my life and self-host more. One tricky point with me is calendaring. I can get a CalDav server running and syncing with my Android phone without much hassle, but I haven’t yet found a server or client that can send e-mail reminders for events, rather than just pop-up notifications.
I’ve been told to try Nextcloud. I tried installing it but it’s overkill for me, and I don’t want to deal with setting up a domain. Surely there can’t be exactly one CalDav option that can send email reminders. But I’ve never heard anyone say anything other than “Nextcloud.”
Nextcloud is definitely overkill if you’re just after a calendar / reminder.
I ditched Nextcloud and went for radicale, but I’ve not looked into sending emails as reminders (I want less emails not more)
Is this for adhoc events like “visit the dentist”, or are you trying to automate a regular event like “put out the recycling”?
The latter could be done with cron and sendmail for example
Yeah, the email reminders I’d like would be for both types of events (one-offs and recurring ones). And although it would work, I guess, I’m not crawling around in crontab every time I need to add something to my schedule.
I use SoGo for that.
Cal and task sync. Card dav, Email und calendar in one neat web interface
This looks quite promising, thank you! I’ll be trying that.
Sending emails is too old, and requires a full online app to send you the reminder. Only google or other big corps support this because a bounced email is retried many hours later… Heck, just the sending might suppose delays. The current calendar solutions give push notifications to clients (e.g. PC or phone)
There’s no better solution to a problem than, “your problem is wrong.”
Counterpoint: if you system is configured such that the mere act of trying to send an email results in serious delays and regular bounces, you’re doing email wrong. Even push notifications may require third party routing through Google, Apple, or similar to get to the core OS in some cases.
Yes, I recognize that hosting an SMTP server is difficult these days and can’t always be done at home due to IP restrictions. But that doesn’t mean you have to have an email server at home. I have a third party email on my domain and I can dispatch SMTP which arrives at expected non-delayed times even to Google and Microsoft accounts.
I honestly wish more software would simply speak to an SMTP server of choice rather than defaulting to just hitting the CLI mail send or attempting a direct SMTP connection.
Unless I’m missing something, there doesn’t seem to be any functionality for email reminders either on the server side or client side for them. I tried Etesync once, although it has been a bit.
If you don’t find anything, I suggest you go the automation route with Active Pieces or N8N
No idea how CalDav runs, but if it’s a server, it should be able to run generic scripts, no? Once you are running a generic script, writing one that sends emails though smtp should be possible. Idk.