Google calendar syncing causing TBird to crash

[leonpmu]

Hi everyone. I am a sysadmin for a smallish company (50+) I have an issue on only 1 machine. We have been using thunderbird in a cross platform environment for at least 15 years now and this is the first time I have experienced this. The user is on a laptop with Windows 7 64 bit. Using Thunderbird with mail and calendar hosted by google.
Have had no issues up until recently when converting a few calendar inputs on his phone from the badly inbuilt calendar (glaring at Samsung) and converting quite a lot of entries to rather be on the google calendar in order to sync to tbird.

It looks like there is an entry that is "corrupted" and that each time we try and sync it, it downloads a few thousand entries, then tries to load them into the calendar is completely blocks thunderbird to a not responding state and never recovers until I delete the calendar db.

If anyone has any ideas it would be greatly appreciated. I have already posted to the google calendar support with no luck.

Thanks in advance.

[tanstaafl]

Can you try to find the corrupted entry in google calendar using a browser and replace it?

[leonpmu]

Unfortunately it seems impossible to find out which one it is. I had posted on the gmail calendar forums but unfortunately there was very little help there, the only response I got was "check thunderbird forums".

[Gone Postal]

Unfortunately it seems impossible to find out which one it is. I had posted on the gmail calendar forums but unfortunately there was very little help there, the only response I got was "check thunderbird forums".

Bit of a convoluted process but could you:

1) Export the calendar as an ics file
2) Use one of the online convertors to create a csv file from the ics
3) Delete the calendar data from the troublesome machine
4) Use a spreadsheet program to split the csv file into batches
5) Import the batches one by one to see which is causing the problem
6) Drill down into the suspect batch using the same sort of splitting the csv process until the corrupted entry is found
7) Delete that from the csv and delete the calendar data which you have recently uploaded to the machine
8) Import the edited csv(s) to the calendar on the machine
9) Tidy up the corrupted entry on the Google calendar

A lot of faffing about but you should eventually be able to find the problem data.

[tanstaafl]

Try exporting the google calendar as a *.ics file using your browser per https://support.google.com/calendar/answer/37111 . Then open it using a text editor such as Notepad++ and see if you can spot something that doesn't look right.

There are also *.ics calendar validator web sites you could try. Some are much stricter than others, I'd suggest you try to use one that is very permissive since you don't want to find harmless errors that google calendar tolerated.

https://mozilla-comm.github.io/ical.js/validator.html
https://icalendar.org/validator.html
https://icalevents.com/support/document ... cs-guides/
https://stackoverflow.com/questions/264 ... e-calendar

Another possibility would be to import the *.ics file into another free calendar service such as https://fruux.com and see if it succeeds. If it does you could experiment with either using it (rather than google calendar) or export it, import it into google calendar, and see if the round trip fixed the problem.

However it might be much quicker to just create a new calendar manually if you don't need to preserve old entries.

[leonpmu]

Hi there everyone, thanks so much for the suggestions, I will definitely try those, I don't mind trying anything like that as long as we get a solution. I really appreciate the effort!

Will revert as soon as I have had a chance to work on this.

Thanks again.