Sunday, February 24, 2013

Opening ICS Files with Thunderbird/Lightning

Now as the world is slowly progressing towards the 21st century when it comes to calendaring tools, some websites offer to download a calendar file (ical, ics, ...) for events they publish.

The problem in my environment is, that no application on my (Windows) PC is registered to handle this file type.
Thunderbird/Lightning simply does no do this.

The out-of-the-box solution without any hacking is to simply download the .ics file e.g. to the desktop, and then drag&drop it to Thunderbird's today pane. This triggers an import. Quite OK.

Works with TB17 and Lightning 1.9.
(Sometimes it seems I have to hold the Ctrl key to force a copy (instead of a move)... awkward.

3 comments:

pnellesen said...

This is old, but I discovered that you can drag the .ics link from Firefox directly to the Events pane in Thunderbird and it will open the event for saving. This is WITHOUT having to save the .ics file first - a direct drag/drop from Firefox to Thunderbird.

Roman said...

you are right, this seems to work quite well to, but I noticed not always. I guess the mime-type reported by the web site seems to play a role...
Let me mark this down as a "to be tested" and report back :)

Roman said...

Indeed it should work, and I nailed down the cases where it fails.
See here