Sync problems with Baikal & Radicale

Calendar
1

Hi all,

I have been using outlook.com for a year to sync all my contacts (1,228 entries) and calendar events (18,753 entries from 2008 to 2026) with eM Client via AirSync. I am using eM Client 10.4.4209 (paid license) on Windows 10.

Now I want to have my data not stored in a Microsoft cloud and tried some other options using CalDAV/CardDAV sync:

1) Baikal on a webhost
I tried using an up-to-date installation of Baikal using a SQL database (not SQLite) and syncing. It turned out that all 1,228 contacts were synced quite fast, but only 1,701 calendar events out of 18,753 were synced. I uninstalled and re-installed Baikal several times and every time all contacts were synced but only exactly 1,701 events. There were no restrictions regarding harddisk size or database size and eM Client was running more than one day to overcome possible time/rate limits.

2) Radicale on a Raspi via Docker
I installed Radicale as Docker container on a local Raspberry Pi and started to sync. Again, all contacts were synced, but only 2,753 calendar events. There were no restrictions regarding harddisk size or database size and eM Client was running more than one day to overcome possible time/rate limits.

3) Nextcloud
I installed Nextcloud on a webhost and the calendar and contacts app and started to sync. Again, all contacts were synced but only a certain amount of calendar events. Nextcloud has no option to display the number of elements, but the years 2008-2014 were synced, 2015-2024 were missing and 2025 and 2026 were synced again. eM Client was running more than one day to overcome possible time/rate limits.

Does anyone of you have some thoughts on this? Am I missing something regarding CalDAV/CardDAV sync? As it does not work with three different software packages, I think it might be an eM Client problem?

Greetings, Christian

2

Dear all,

after many hours of investigating, it turned out that the problem is probably not related to eM Client.

Explanation: I had my contacts in Microsoft Outlook, stored on my outlook_com account. It seems that they might not use a correct (really unique) ID for calendar events. Or maybe it might be the fault of eM Client when copying the calendar events to the folder to be synced? However, when I exported and double checked the calendar events from the folder to be synced, I realized that most of them had only zeros (0) as UID in the ics file. I wrote a VBA macro which exported the Outlook calendar events to an ics file (and inserting a correct unique UID), re-imported this ics file to eM Client and started to sync - everything works fine now. My suspicion is, that a number of calendar events had really unique IDs and therefore were synced correctly and the rest of them had zeros as ID which caused the problems.

Thank you, Christian

1 Like
3

Found this interesting - I had a similar problem with CardDAV contacts (the thread on that).

As far as I could tell, my contacts did get “broken” over time (bad Nexcloud update by me while self hosting or something else, not 100% sure).

Radicale (haven’t tried Baikal) is more liberal in terms of what it accepts, so it would take it all as it is.

Betterbird email client is similar - it would work with it.

Em Client was the first (and only one) to complain.

Had to fix my contacts (some manually, some by importing them to an up-to-date managed Nextcloud instance), and then it all worked.

To avoid the problem I’m using managed Nextcloud for the time being.
Contact updates from Em Client and from Iphone seem to not be causing any problems for now.

Not sure if this helps, but it was a bit scary and quite frustrating until I figured it out.

Relja