1. Fastmail
  2. Calendar
  3. Troubleshooting

Troubleshooting calendar issues

Why am I getting multiple notifications for a single event?

If you have synchronized a calendar with an external service, such as Google, or iCloud, or some other CalDAV host, then your event exists in multiple places: once with Fastmail, and once with your external service (and potentially on your phone or tablet, too).

If your event is configured to send an email or display an alert, then each platform that holds a copy of your event will obey the notification settings, resulting in multiple notifications.

If you attempt to remove a notification from an event, then it will be removed from all platforms, and you'll end up with no notifications.

There is no workaround for this at the moment, so long as you maintain your calendar in multiple locations.

Accepting invites for an external account calendar

If you have a synced calendar available on Fastmail and you have an event invitation to add to that calendar, you will need to access that invitation email on your source account in order to add it to the calendar.

Attempting to access the invitation email through Fastmail (either via a mail forward, or accessed via a POP import) to add it to the synced calendar on Fastmail will result in an error.

If this happens frequently, you may want to consider migrating your calendar to Fastmail.

Sending invites for an external account calendar

If you create an event in a synced calendar available on Fastmail, the remote calendar will send out the event invitations and updates. All RSVPs to that event will be returned to your remote account for processing at the source.

If you would prefer the replies come back to your Fastmail account, you may want to consider migrating your calendar to Fastmail.

Sending invites for shared calendars from clients

If you are using a calendar someone shared with you that you don't own, you won't be able to send invitations to events through an email client. You'll need to either log in to the web and create the event there, or ask invitees to check the shared calendar manually and mark themselves as Going.

Migrated and moved events

If you have migrated an external calendar into Fastmail, any attendees for the events don't know that you have moved the calendar from one account to another. Their RSVPs will still return to the original email account.

You will also need to have an email address which matches that of the original account in order to have event updates be sent out for the migrated events.

All new events made in that calendar will work as expected, with mail coming in and out of your Fastmail account.

Events that have been moved between an external calendar and a Fastmail calendar will experience the same issues.

Setting external calendars as the default calendar

At this time, we do not support setting external calendars as the default calendar. If you do not have any calendars created in your Fastmail account and sync external calendars with your account, then one of your external calendars will be designated as your default calendar at random. 

Sync failures: external accounts

Calendars synced from external services or URLs will periodically update. If we can't connect to the external source, we will display this on the Settings → Calendars screen. If we are unable to connect after five attempts in a row, we will disable syncing for the calendar.

The most common causes for sync failures are:

  • The password for the external account has been changed
  • Two-factor authentication (2FA) is enabled on the external account
  • The external account has been deleted
  • A corrupt event has occurred on the remote server.

Update password

To update the password for a linked external account:

  1. Open the Settings → Calendars screen.
  2. Under the Calendar section, find the account and click the Update Password button (or Reauthenticate for a Google account).

After you have done this, re-enable syncing on calendars for which it has been disabled:

  1. On the Settings → Calendar screen, find the affected calendar(s).
  2. Click Add.

If two-factor authentication has been enabled on the external account, you will need to create an app password, and update your password for that account in Fastmail as described above. Here are instructions for generating application passwords for popular sites you might be syncing your information with:

Account deleted

For a deleted account, you will need to delete the associated calendar from Fastmail.

Corrupt event

If deleting and re-adding your calendar to your Fastmail account still produces sync errors, it's possible that the data stored on the other service is corrupt in some way and is failing to be imported into Fastmail.

Contact support to get help in this situation.

Sync failures: CalDAV to device

Trying to sync a calendar from your Fastmail account to a device via CalDAV can generate errors.

  1. Your username/password is wrong. Check caps lock isn't on, and for common visual errors like mistaking a 0 (zero) for an O (capital o), or a 1 (one) for an l (lowercase letter L).
  2. You are using your normal password, or your 2FA password. This doesn't work with a mobile device: you need to use an app password for CalDAV or CardDAV access.

Editing an event doesn't work

You can't edit an event which you didn't create: that is, an event you are invited to.

If you are getting errors trying to edit an event that you did create, check that your current default address matches the account that owns the calendar. This is especially important for calendars from a synced source.

Known issues with Yahoo and Google

For reasons unclear to us, Yahoo are currently blocking all connections to their calendar from our servers, so we are unfortunately unable to sync with Yahoo calendar at this time. If you are a Yahoo customer and want to sync your Calendar with Fastmail, please contact Yahoo directly and let them know. We will enable this option as soon as the block is lifted.

When importing calendar events from Google, any attachments from the events are stripped after importing. Unfortunately, this is something that occurs on Google's end, which means there isn't anything that can be done on Fastmail's end to address this.

In this case, we recommend contacting Google support directly for further troubleshooting.

No printing support

Unfortunately, we do not support printing your calendars from the Fastmail interface at this time. Instead, you can sync your calendar to a client and print from there.

Invites from Google senders not reaching Fastmail

If you have a Google calendar with same email address as your Fastmail email address, the invites send from Google servers are directly added to your Google calendar. The invite is not routed externally to Fastmail servers where the emails for your domain is hosted. Unfortunately, there isn't anything that can be done on Fastmail's end to address this.

Duplicate invites and calendar entries

If you have your Google calendar synced to Fastmail and you also fetch emails or forward emails from this Google account to Fastmail, you will end up with duplicate copies of the invitation email. If the account is set to automatically add the events to default calendar, you will end up with duplicate calendar entries as event is automatically added to your default Fastmail calendar as well as the Google calendar synced to Fastmail.

To get the best calendar experience, we recommend migrating your external calendars to Fastmail and sync your Fastmail calendar on your devices.

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