Thunderbird Lightning (v5.4.5) - some events (anniversary, death date) are not synced

🍱 Features & apps 📆 Calendar
1

Beside a birthday and a death date an anniversary date can be defined in a Nextcloud (v12.0.3) contact record, which are all automatically be used to create calendar events in a calendar called “contact birthdays”. An anniversary event record, e.g. looks like this:

BEGIN:VCALENDAR
VERSION:2.0
PRODID:-//Sabre//Sabre VObject 4.1.2//EN
CALSCALE:GREGORIAN
BEGIN:VEVENT
DTSTAMP:20171031T145414Z
DTSTART;VALUE=DATE:20001120
DTEND;VALUE=DATE:20001121
UID:2e1d9687-5a7c-4982-9ad3-bc2cae595476
RRULE:FREQ=YEARLY
SUMMARY:Mr.Tom Jones (∞­2000)
TRANSP:TRANSPARENT
BEGIN:VALARM
TRIGGER;VALUE=DURATION:-PT0M
ACTION:DISPLAY
DESCRIPTION:Mr.Tom Jones (∞2000)
END:VALARM
END:VEVENT
END:VCALENDAR

If you now add this calendar to Lightning, its content, usually birthdays, are correctly displayed as e.g. “Mr.Tom Jones (*1970)”, except death and anniversary records. These kind of records are not imported and displayed in the subscribed calendar. My assumption is, that the special characters which are used in the SUMMARY and DESCRIPTION fields to mark these kind of events, is causing a problem during the import.

Anniversary events are usually containing the infinity symbol (hex:e29a) in front of the year, e.g. “(∞­2000)”, death dates are containing a cross symbol (hex:e280) in front of the year, e.g. “(†2010)”.

Has anyone else realized this problem and confirm it? I’ve opened a bug ticket in parallel in the Mozilla bug tracker (https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1420243) but it hasn’t yet been confirmed)

2

Can you import these calendars via the web-interface?

3

Better a late reply then never posting a reply :wink: In the meantime I’ve switched from the Thunderbird SOGo Connector addon (https://sogo.nu/download.html#/frontends) to the fantastic CardBook addon (https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/thunderbird/addon/cardbook/). With this addons all kind of dates are correctly displayed in the Thunderbird.

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