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Why are email and calendar so inextricably linked? (lemmy.ml)
submitted 2 years ago by to c/nostupidquestions@lemmy.world
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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.

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[–] [S] 1 point 2 years ago* (1 child)

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?

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  • [–] 1 point 2 years ago

    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.

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