Google Calendar + Thunderbird + iCal Email invitations
If you are trying to get google calendar working with thunderbird email invitations, it seems there are a few tricks to get it working. Here are some quick notes that might be helpful:
Install lightning .9 or later. If you are on x64, select ‘other systems’ and you’ll be lead to the x64 version of the XPI file. Firefox will offer to install this, but it’s a lightning plugin not a firefox plugin. Ignore that and save to your hard drive, and install from lightning’s addons page instead.
Install google calendar provider 5.1 or later.
Add a new calendar, from the network, using ‘google’
Grab the ical link for private calendars on the sharing tab of your calendar’s properties page (I also tried xml but ical seemed better).
Check the error console if you have issues.
modification_failed: due to wrong timezone in lightning. If tz list doesn’t appear in the preferences, go to advaced config editor and blank out the timezone setting (it was set to ‘floating’ in my case)
You need to set enablecalendarinvites option to true in the advanced options editor. I also set the auto refresh timeout to 15 The default was 3, and the internet connection was slow (not sure if this helped)
To see updates, reload the remote calendars in lightning, then click the refresh link in google calendar.
Make sure that your thunderbird email account is selected in the properties for the local calendar. You might also want to disable all calendars that are not google. Otherwise, it’s easy to see an event that’s actually on your local non-google calendar, and then wonder why it’s not syncing. Don’t just hide the calendar, actually disable it temporarily.
And, after much testing and trying, it finally worked. It seemed that the specific recipe had been tested more than once, and only succeeded eventually. Ditto on my windows laptop, which worked much better after chilling for 24 hours.
Some say you can make it work with just calDav. That seemed to have too many issues when I tried it. You don’t need all of this if you just want bi-directional calendar edits. These extra steps are for enabling email invitations to be received and reflected both locally and on google.