Sunday, 4 April 2010

Thunderbird & Lightning - can't dismiss reminders, again?






Previously I fixed the inability to dismiss reminders in Thunderbird (the free Thunderbird email software, which with Lightning and Provider add-ons enables me to view and update my Google Calendars within Thunderbird). That time, making sure that Read Only was UNchecked and that the Cache was UNticked in the Lightning calendar properties worked.

Recently, the problem recurred. Funnily enough it only affected my own calendars, not the Google calendars which friends hadshared with me.

This time round, unticking Read-only and enabling and disabling Cache didn't work. I spent ages trying to sort it.

Here are my tips on what worked. Basic, perhaps, but it solved the problem for me. I don't know exactly which step fixed it, but I'm sharing what I did in case it helps someone else:

  1. In Thunderbird's Options for Lightning (menu Tools > Options > Lightning), choose the Alarms, sub-tab, UNtick everything in the first "When an alarm goes off" section (outlined in red below) and OK.


  2. Delete the affected Google Calendars from Thunderbird (just select the calendar in the list at the left of Calendar view and hit Delete key, or rightclick it and choose Delete, see screenshot at 7 below).
  3. Disable Provider add-on (menu Tools > Add-ons, scroll to find it and click the Disable button).


  4. Restart Thunderbird.
  5. Re-enable Provider (as 3 but click the Enable button).
  6. Restart Thunderbird.
  7. Re-add the affected Google Calendars to Thunderbird (in calendar view rightclick on the calendars, New Calendar, On the Network, choose Google Calendar and use your Google Calendar address).


  8. Re-enable alarms (as in 1, but tick those boxes now and OK).

Now, finally, my Thunderbird Google Calendar reminders can be dismissed. Hope it works for others too.

6 comments:

Marco said...

Disabling the Readonly and Cache options helped me. However, I get an error message "Modification Failed" after dismissing. Although it doesn't seem to compromise any functionality, it doesn't make me feel comfortable.
Thunderbird is becoming a resource hog like his cousin Firefox, which I already abandoned for Google Chrome. Since I work with linux Ubunut I am considering switching from TB to Evolution.

Anonymous said...

I was having the same problem with Yahoo Calendar. I tried just unchecking ShowMissedAlarms. This appeared to work, though I'm thinking that Yahoo may not play well with the whole "dismissed alarms" feature of TB. It seems that each time it synched with the online cal, TB would think all the old appointments were not dismissed. I assume it still does, I just told it to ingore them. Ah well ...

Anonymous said...

These instructions solved the problem for me.

I'm thinking it might be the un-checking the alert options first. Then adding the calendar. Then re-enabling the alerts.

My guess is it might be choking on having an initial batch of existing reminders and invites to process. But by disabling and re-enabling alerts, it kind of resets them quietly.

Nick Anderson said...

Thanks for the tip, worked for me.

Erik said...

Thanks, this worked for me too. Got the problem after updating thunderbird to V17.0.5 with Lightning 1.9.1.

StevenUK said...

A less dramatic workaround is to shutdown Thunderbird and then remove the reminder in the affected event in Google using a web browser.