How to handle calendar invites when I have multiple accounts?

October 15, 2018 7:41 AM

I get a lot of calendar invites in my work. They don't work well because I have multiple email addresses and accounts. My primary calendar is a google calendar, attached to an account that I don't want to make public. My primary email is not a gmail email. Is there a way to make all this work?

To explain a little more:

- My main address is [e-mail]. It is an address at a domain I own. It is hosted at fastmail, and I access it using thunderbird via IMAP.

- My primary calendar is a google calendar. It is attached to a google account [e-mail]

- Clients and other business contacts send calendar invites to [e-mail]. I assume these come from multiple sources: gmail, outlook, who knows. I'd love to be able to click on those, have my clients receive confirmation that the invite was accepted [e-mail] (which currently does happen) and have the event show up in my google calendar (which currently does not happen).

- As a bonus: I'd love to also be able to *send* calendar invites.

Is there a way to make this work? Any ideas, solutions, much appreciated!

posted by ManInSuit to Computers & Internet (4 answers total)

I'd strongly recommend setting up a Google G Suite business account and linking that to your domain name. You'll continue to own it, but you'll use gmail instead of fastmail. (I don't believe that should impair continuing to use Thunderbird, but I haven't actually done so myself.)

Then, you can add your 'work' account as a shared calendar on your primary one that you don't want people to see, and have both work and non-work items on it.

(I'm assuming the reason for your split is that you have non-work events also on that calendar, and strongly want to maintain a personal/professional split. Otherwise, I don't understand the desire to have your primary calendar be 'unknown' and my answer's probably wrong.)
posted by Tomorrowful at 7:46 AM on October 15, 2018

Yeah, what I ended up doing is setting up G Suite and running all my work-related appointments through that. I was able to get it talking to my other accounts and email addresses fairly easily, so anything people send me or that I set up myself ends up there. In my case my work email is run through Gmail, but it didn't seem like there would have been anything stopping me from setting up a dedicated Gmail account on the side as a sort of shell account and setting things up from there.
posted by Anticipation Of A New Lover's Arrival, The at 9:30 AM on October 15, 2018

You can set up a Gcalendar account for your domain email account without having Gmail for it, then you can share the calendar and give it full edit rights back and forth with your secret calendar account, so you should be able to click accept to add events to your domain GCal account, which will then show up on your primary calendar where you actually track stuff.
posted by COD at 9:50 AM on October 15, 2018

I used calend.ly to link all my calendars and set rules for appointment booking by clients (payment agreements, minimum notice, not if something else is booked)
posted by tilde at 2:34 PM on October 15, 2018