Side bar

[hankfoner]

1) Suddenly a side bar with a calendar has appeared when I open an email. Can anybody please tell me why and how to get rid of it. I played with the settings but had no luck.

2) To add insult to injury the calendar shows my wife's computer gmail calendar and not mine! If it showed my gmail calendar I might even leave the sidebar on sometimes. I started using gmail's calendar years ago from before FM had on and it's too complicated to change over now.
Thanks,
HANK

[FredOnline]

In the top right corner of the web page window, there's a square divided into two with three dots in the right hand box.

That should toggle on/off.

[hankfoner]

Originally Posted by FredOnline

In the top right corner of the web page window, there's a square divided into two with three dots in the right hand box.

That should toggle on/off.

Thanks Fred. I found it and it works. Now I can see if it of any use to me. Any idea of why my own gmail calendar is not being shown, but only my wife's ( we share each other's gmail calendars) ?
Best wishes

[hadaso]

I too suddenly have the calendar open on the side though I never used the calendar feature in FastMail. I have neither my Google calendar nor my wife's Google calendar show up there. But it seems to automatically get populated with some but not all events sent to some of my email address (seems that it has been doing it in the past, but it doesn't look consistent, and I hope no email was sent automatically).
If I can respond to invites with the email address they were sent to I might use the FastMail calendar, but currently I don't see even a way to set up a single dedicated identity for used with calendar responses. I tried to figure out how email is sent from the calendar but found no ineligible information about it: the documentation says something about mail being sent from my FastMail account, but doesn't say what email address is used to identify the sender (al my email is sent form my Fastmail account, using various email addresses. None is sent using the account name that I use only to login, and none is sent using the default identity unless by mistake I forget to choose a sending identity. The calendar help doesn't specify what address is meant by "from the account". As far as I am concerned an email account is a place that stores email. It has nothing to do with email addresses that are used in email delivery to identify destinations and not storage locations).
Usually if I need to respond to an invitation (which doesn't happen often) then if it's work email I open up Outlook in my office desktop and respond from there, and otherwise I just send a separate email instead of responding through the calendar. Anyway, I usually prefer to create the events in my calendar myself with just what I want to remember about the event instead of have a copy of someone's email saved as an event. And I certainly don't want work email to be replied with the address I use to communicate with my trade union and vice versa.

[n5bb]

The Fastmail Calendar is populated in several different manners:

• Events you manually place on the calendar by double-clicking where you want it or using the + New Event button.
• The birthdays of contacts whose birthday is set in their Contacts entry. To enable birthdays to populate the calendar, select the Calendars button (right of the + New Event button at the top of the Calendar screen) and check Birthdays.
• Links to iCal files added at Settings>Account>Calendars>Subscriptions. For example, I'm subscribed to the NYT Astronomy and Space Calendar provided by the New York Times.
• CalDAV calendars from accounts (such as Google or Apple iCloud) added at Settings>Account>Calendars>Add Account.
• Events added to your calendar from incoming emails. You can configure whether this is fully automatic, fully manual, or some mixture of these at Settings>Customize>Preferences>(Show advanced preferences at the very end)>Invitation handling (at the very end).

When you create a new Calendar event and invite someone else to the event, this invitation email is sent in the background (hidden from you) using your default compose new messages address configured at the top of the Settings>Customize>Sending Identities screen.

• Unfortunately, you can't set a different sending identity for calendar invitations sent from the default From identity for the normal email Compose feature.
• So you could set up a special alias and sending identity for sending certain calendar invitations, then manually navigating to Settings>Customize>Sending Identities and temporarily setting that sending identity as default, then opening the Calendar and creating the event with one or more persons invited to the event, saving the new event, then going back and resetting your default compose new messages address. This should work, but requires a lot of manual actions.
• My idea for a new feature: I think that the most straightforward manner of configuring a particular email address to be used for sending invitations would be to add a choice for the email address/identity in the Settings>Account>Calendars>Edit & Share area for a particular named calendar. When you create an invitation, at the top you can choose which named calendar (with a color) is used to hold that event. If you could configure an email address/identity associated with each named calendar, then by setting the named calendar before sending the invitation you could determine the From address to be used. This would also allow an incoming invitation sent to you to be automatically placed on the correct calendar associated with that email address.

Bill

[hadaso]

Originally Posted by n5bb

My idea for a new feature: I think that the most straightforward manner of configuring a particular email address to be used for sending invitations would be to add a choice for the email address/identity in the Settings>Account>Calendars>Edit & Share area for a particular named calendar. When you create an invitation, at the top you can choose which named calendar (with a color) is used to hold that event. If you could configure an email address/identity associated with each named calendar, then by setting the named calendar before sending the invitation you could determine the From address to be used. This would also allow an incoming invitation sent to you to be automatically placed on the correct calendar associated with that email address.Bill

That's exactly what I need to be able to use the calendar not just as a place to keep reminders for myself.
In the past FastMail promoted itself as a place where one can aggregate all one's email activity: deal with all one's email in one place.
So I get all my email forwarded to FastMail (or retrieved by FastMail), and send (almost) all of my email from Fastmail, using different identities.
So my activity is separated to several roles. In one role I communicate with family and friends. In another role I communicate with colleagues and customers at work (and I used to have several such "roles" with several employers in the past). In yet another role I am a consumer of goods and services. And these roles should not mix (expecialy not my "work" role with my "personal life roles"). To be able to act in all these roles in one email interface, for each role I have an identity or several identities and a separate set of folders. It's like having several email accounts, but are all in one screen, in separate folder trees (actually I still l receive most of the email in one common inbox, which is more convenient than separate inboxes as I am still one person, and then when I deal with them I place them in the appropriate folders).
That's why I don't really have a "default" identity, because neither my work identity nor my personal life identity can serve as a substitute for the other. to aggregate all my activity in one place I need a way to separate roles.
Folders and identities are quite good in achieving role separation with email (except that there's no way to force myself to select an identity before sending mail). Custom Sieve allows me to separate email handling rules by roles instead of by type of rules. The calendar doesn't fit right now with acting in different roles with separate identities in on interface.
So I really hope something like what you suggested here can be incorporated in the calendar, because it would be very useful for me and perhaps others that came to FastMail to be able to act in all their roles in one place.

[Gankaku]

Gee I didn't know that was there. That's cool!

I've not had a computer in over a month - I had to make a new one because my old one wasn't working so hot. So I don't know what's going on - life can change so much in a month! Like, for example, a new button in Fastmail!