Moving Google Contacts and Calendar to NextCloud
selfhostedheaven.com
selfhostedheaven.com
Generally, supporting open interoperable standards that make switching providers easy is bad for business, so I'm generally a lot more surprised at where it is supported, rather than at where it isn't.
FWIW I sync my Android data with my iPhone (personal -v- work devices) using the FDroid DAVx⁵ and ICSx⁵ apps, rather than the author's one-time export solution, and they seem to work ok.
Exactly this. Google makes it very, very easy to have everything synced to a Google account on Android devices: just log in and it just works. You contacts, mail and calendar are all immediately available on your new device. If they'd implement CalDAV in an easy manner, it would probably be a more viable option for less tech-savvy people.
What the parent commenter said: from a business perspective it doesn't make sense to implement it.
Fortunately there are some good, relatively simple to use apps available to implement it for us.
>rather than the author's one-time export solution, and they seem to work ok. The reason why a simple one-time export was my go-to solution, is because I really don't want my data on Google's servers. In the blogpost I explain how to import the data to Nextcloud and use that as a 'single source of truth'. Other devices can then sync up to your nextcloud instance.
I don't have an iPhone, so I'm not sure how/if this would work on iOS, but I am sure that it's possible to sync it up in a similar manner.
It was one of the reasons I switched from Android to an iPhone. It's really annoying to use Android if you don't want to use Gmail and Google Calendar, while on iOS it's super easy to use a third party for email, calendar and password manager.
But that's of course just an anecdote, I'm sure you're right and it in general bad for business.
You need to find instructions based on your specific device. Each one is different.
GrapheneOS.org
And uninstalling an app is impossible on stock Android, if that app is made by Google.To achieve that I had to unlock the boot loader of my phone, for which there was no official method.
Meanwhile on iOS I can use the default mail and calendar apps that work fine and my password manager integrates perfectly with the os, while I don't need to use iCloud at all if I don't want to.
Those 3 apps weren't the only reason to switch from os, but they did make the choice for, and switching to, iOS a lot easier.
Apple is in a position where they can't expect everyone to be happy with iCloud, which is great because it means they actually put effort into supporting (decently!) a range of third party services. Siri generally isn't as smart as Google Assistant, but it also isn't completely obsessed with Google services. That is to say, unlike Google Assistant, every app on my phone - without exception - actually knows what is on my NextCloud calendar. And it actually gets useful information from my email to do helpful things with.
On the other hand, if you look at how Android has progressed over the years, I think Google has been trying very hard to forget about Android's past as a flexible operating system that exists outside of Google's ecosystem.
They don't even try with the stuff they extended android with, Android Wear and android's Daydream: no third party stores allowed, only loading via ADB.
I've run an Android phone without any Google account at all (something that's not possible on iOS), using a combination of FDroid and Yalp to work around the lack of Play. The fact that this is possible lulls people into this idea that Google is more open, but the reality is it's pain. You're locked out of many basic phone features, notifications are flakey, many updates don't work, and once you do opt into a Google account it invades every part of your phone's experience.
At least with iOS I can sign up for a fresh empty apple account and it leaves the rest of the (admittedly limited and very locked down) phone to me.
If you want to transfer contacts from the main addressbook you have to go through iCloud and export to vcf for a full take, last time I checked on iOS 12 I wasn't able to copy between addressbooks. Sorry if this has changed.
But while Android can't do other carddav accounts by itself, you can export the .vcf on-device. So while Apple offers to embed another carddav account, the migration story is not better but worse.
Is there some trick to get google products to regularly poll (or poll on demand) for updated ical/ics info?
I can very easily, using only built in apps and set up, share a calendar, a todo list, a photo album, a music playlist, a note, an e-mail account etc. with my wife.
But I cannot share a contact list with her without resorting to complicated CardDAV setups.
One thing, you don't have to expose that mariadb port, all services in a docker-compose file are on the same network unless otherwise specified (and you can address them by their container name, build-in DNS!) :)
Oh and you can super-power it by Using Traefik for https, you just need to add some stuff to your docker-compose.yaml file. Although OP mentions a reverse proxy already, outside of this compose file.
I wrote a bit about this too with more detail, but I'm too afraid that HN will smash my poor Corei3 server :p. I want to get all of it on GitHub at some point, and then share it.
I now about Traefik, but I use the Synology reverse proxy at the moment. I felt that it is not fair to include it in this blogpost, since it is not an open source solution and not truely in the spirit of selfhosting. I plan to make the switch in the future to another reverse proxy like Traefik, Caddy or maybe just Nginx, not sure yet.
Could you give me the link to the blogpost? I might link to it :) Quality conten t must be shared and I think we as selfhosters should make it as approachable as possible for newcomers.
I really have to think about the post and update it, perhaps I'll get back to you and put it on a vps, not on "the hub of my digital life", before I share it.
Actually almost everything I learned and use I heard about on the Self-hosted podcast [1], and on one of the host's GitHub repos [2] (who takes personal infra as code to the next level).
[0]: https://github.com/traefik/traefik/blob/master/LICENSE.md
https://markfrancis.io/post/2021-04-20-bitwarden-docker-comp...
https://github.com/matthewaveryusa/tesseract_dockerfile/blob...
I also use Nextcloud for my Notes/Task Lists (also works great with iphone and evolution), bookmarks, and recipe management.
My only issue with Nextcloud, is I really with they had an LTS release with at least 2 years of support. I have to keep my server moving between major versions pretty much every 4-6 months (you can't skip versions), or the clients which tend to get auto updated (especially on iOS) stop supporting the older server versions.
Like the author I've also seen many such horror stories before, but always thought that wouldn't happen to me. I'm setting up my new email address on my own domain now, and encourage everyone to do the same. I'm still waiting for my appeal, so have not yet exactly checked how many sites I've lost access to because of Google login. Anyways, I will not make the mistake of using Google login or an email with domain not under my control for registering on any site again, even the least important ones.
If Google kills your account, gmail and youtube are gone. Every social auth account is frozen. No clue what happens to your Android devices but your Play purchases are gone. Your Google Voice number disappears. It's a bad place to be. The story isn't any different for Facebook (Whatsapp, Instagram, Occulus), Apple (icloud, app store), and many many others.
And even then, I'm starting to see the same dangers for any centralized auth provider.
The only feature I miss from Radicale is the built-in support for versioning in Git. It's definitely handy to keep track of/roll back changes to my calendars, contacts, todos, etc on the server.
I wrote a small script [1] that periodically syncs changes from my Nextcloud cal/cardDAV feeds into a Git repository. Sharing it here as a bonus in case it's useful to others.
Performance on document editing was a little laggy as well. Its really noticeable when your cursor lags behind what you type.
I'd love if the great folks over at NextCloud could focus on the following, which would really ease adoption:
* A polished, extensive example of a deployment in docker with all the bells and whistles (Collabora, cron, backups) * An env var / config file way to link and setup collabora with nextcloud. No more installing from a gui and typing in endpoints. Please let me config manage this as code! * a more polished initial setup wizard. I remember getting errors trying to specify all the env vars needed to set up the database. It wasn't obvious what was missing. * A polished config for common proxies. Traefik is the obvious choice for docker I think.
I don't want this to come across wrong, I think the Nextcloud project is great! I feel like they could add a little time to the things mentioned above and give it a fantastic on-boarding experience.
What was the hardware behind? Was it local or in the cloud?
However, I noticed they left out making a mail solution. This is important and shows just how enormous of an opportunity there is in this space to make a quick, easy simple, self hosted mail solution.
Any protonmail-like self hosted *simple* solutions out there?
Sure it is fun to self host mail in your Raspberry in the garage. But for many people the reliability of standard providers is a necessity. And that's even without accounting the anti spam filters
My hosting provider has hosted my email for 15+ years (with my own domain), but their webmail isn't super great, especially for my non-techy family. They mostly use the mail app on their iphone, but Rainloop through nextcloud made it really easy for them to check through the web.
I want to write a beginner friendly guide on selfhosted mail in the future, so if you happen to have some tips, or things you want to know about, let me know!
I never had any issues with either NextCloud or Mail-in-a-Box, I'm pretty happy about those.
Love to hear about this!
Another big thing I love about mailcow is that it has sync jobs so I can create mailbox's within it and have it sync my emails from other gmail accounts I have or really any mail host that you can connect to with IMAP. You can even set it so it deletes the email on the source account, which is great as most of my extra gmail accounts are just used to receive.
The dashboard is pretty great too and you only really need to use the shell, apart from the initial install, to update it every now and then. So many great things I have to say about it and how you can super power it like hosting custom domains and nextcloud among other things. I'm glad I made the change to selfhost. If you know what you're doing I'd 100% recommend you test out running your own mail server for a bit to test the waters.
I’ve been running MIAB (mailinabox) for business and personal since 2016. I haven’t seen any major issues with deliverability but YMMV. You have to register with all the feedback loops. Once you do, you get feedback when something you send gets marked as spam. Spam on MIAB is handled with postgrey and with spamassasin. It’s pretty good, although I’ve had recent issues with spam coming from gmail and hotmail. I’ve also customized some of the config to bounce Microsoft Sharepoint and Google Docs since neither companies control spam coming from their networks.
With e-mail, I haven't had any problems with one exception. When e-mailing the local school system, they reject my e-mails. I looked into it and it turns out that their spam provider was blocking me because I was a private domain or something like that. It was a configuration on their side. Their tech support told me that I should "get an e-mail address with a normal extension."
Outside of that issue, my e-mails have gotten delivered. Between graylisting and the built-in spam filter software, I haven't had any spam issues. It's been smooth as far as that goes. The webmail (roundcube) isn't as nice as gmail but desktop and mobile clients are good in any event.
The mail-in-a-box nextcloud install does use sqlite which means that you should make sure to backup contacts in case sqlite breaks. It broke for me once but I was able to copy my contacts from Thunderbird back into the system without any real problems.
Calendaring works pretty well with Nextcloud but I haven't found any calendar software that I really love. The web software is good but not super fast. Lightning has gotten better but still feels bolted on. Kontact calendar is too groupware-oriented for my personal use. Evolution never quite felt right to me. The built-in Apple calendar and Samsung (Andriod) calendar apps work fairly well.
Not quite the same question you've asked, but I found (since 2014) what you can host anything if you front it with FastMail.
Ping me if you interested, currently on mobile (and in the bar).
I'm hopeful someone will release a simple Go CalDAV and CardDav server, or that someone will contribute to making official packages for CyrusIMAP.
* https://radicale.org - written in python.
* https://sabre.io/baikal/ - written in php...which i see that you are not so crazy about...but i note it only because it is quite solid reputation.
I'm curious why would you want a calDav, cardDav server written in Go? Is it for scalability? Or, ease of deployment? I am not judging your preference at all; i'm genuinely curious? Also, separately, i first learned of cyrus imap from a blogpost that FastMail folks posted, but do not much about it (other than it is highly respected as a platform for mail, calendar, contacts)...Is it built in Go?
Cyrus predates Go by quite a while! The project started in 1994. It's implemented in C.
Such as? I've been looking for some...
>I also find PHP applications incredibly frustrating compared to more simple tools.
Really? I find them so much simpler, just stick everything in a folder and point Apache at that folder. No messing about with extra layers like docker.
[1] https://www.etesync.com/ [2] https://github.com/etesync/etesync-dav/blob/master/README.md...
https://addons.thunderbird.net/en-US/thunderbird/addon/cardb...
It does seem there are less bugs over the past year or so or maybe I'm just learning to deal with it, but it does seem OwnCloud was more stable.
But looking at these comments, it seems as though NextCloud is, far and away, the preferred choice.
Please let me ask a question - does anyone tried to access these data from Thunderbird, or any open-source email client?
Thank you.
I had this running on a Raspberry Pi 4 in this blogpost, which functioned just fine; although only with one user and little apps installed. I might do a follow up when I have used Nextcloud more extensively and explore different hardware options.
I host nextcloud via TrueNAS SCALE running on a dual E5 + 4x2TB NVMe. TrueNAS handles the docker images with a kubernetes cluster managed by middleware. Straying from default settings is a time-consuming path, but the defaults work great.
Nextcloud doesn't feel perfect with lots of UI jank (initial photo upload was a real headache), but I trust the data put there will not delete itself. I love having the ability to selectively view and sync files with native OS explorers on windows, mac, and iOS. iOS photo backup with live photos is also something no other solution I've seen can compete with.
Before everyone moved to cloud services, self-hosting was a goto choice for nerds who wanted their own stuff, including me. One challenge that self-hosting has not really conquered is availability. If your rpi dies, so does your self-hosting. You might want to explore (and blog about) setting-up a failover device. I'd definitely read about that.
I have ~12 users, ranging from a few with less than 5GB of data to a couple power users with ~100GB each.
Overall, I'm quite happy with NC. Sure, there are a couple of rough edges, but for the most part, having a single install handle file, contacts, calendar, chat, etc. has been great.