Warn HN: Google Calendar is not reliable

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.

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

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.

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

Yes, of course!

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.

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.

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.

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?"

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.

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.

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

Um, Outlook does a pretty good job.

Release the hounds.

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.

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?

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

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.

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

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

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.

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

Kiko resurrection?

are you using gmail mailbox for that??? i also had issues with local mailbox but gmail+googcal pair works fine for me.

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%.

Yes, I can see how this might trouble you. I mean, you've paid good money for a 100% performance SLA.

30boxes does good enough for me.

use rememberthemilk.com

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

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

Same here never had an issue.