596960 - Alarms/Reminders don't popup if they are old

Status: UNCONFIRMED

(Calendar :: Alarms, defect)

Description

[[e-mail]]

User-Agent:       Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 6.1; en-US; rv:1.9.2.2) Gecko/20100316 Firefox/3.6.2 (.NET CLR 3.5.30729)
Build Identifier: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 6.1; en-US; rv:1.9.2.9) Gecko/20100825 Lightning/1.0b2 Thunderbird/3.1.3

I am using the lightning addon with an online calendar on a private CalDav server.


At the first startup of Thunderbird, it retrieves the online calendar and correctly alarms you with all the tasks that have been past due, no matter how old they are.

But after the first snooze or dismiss of one of the initial alarms, the alarms of tasks that are older than a few days do not longer popup.

This renders the alarm system useless because you lose many important tasks if you do not get informed/alarmed that they have been past due.

Reproducible: Always

Steps to Reproduce:
1. Run Thunderbird
2. Thunderbird retrieves the online calendar and the reminder list pops up correctly with all the past due tasks
3. Snooze/dismiss one or all of the listed alarms
4. Wait a while for the alarm window to popup again
5. The alarm window does not contain all the past due reminders as it did the first time, listing only the most recent ones.
Actual Results:  
The alarm window contains reminders for only the most recent tasks and events, excluding all the ones that are older than a few days.

Expected Results:  
The alarm system should popup the alarm window with all the past due tasks and events no matter how old they are.

Comment 1

[Bas van den Bosch]

see bug 496889 and bug 276585 which want the pposite. According to bug 496889 comment 5 ther's a preference "calendar.alarms.showmissed" which can be set. Does this work for you?

Comment 2

[Wayne Mery (:wsmwk)]

(In reply to Bas van den Bosch from comment #1)
> see bug 496889 and bug 276585 which want the pposite. According to bug
> 496889 comment 5 ther's a preference "calendar.alarms.showmissed" which can
> be set. Does this work for you?

empire, does this work for you?

Comment 3

[[e-mail]]

Sorry, I don't use calDav anymore it's been 7 years and I just can't remember anything about it except that I gave up on calendar and tasks in lightning/thunderbird due to too many issues.

Comment 4

[WaltS48 [:walts48]]

I see "calendar.alarms.showmissed;true" in my 60.8.0 so this should work now. Created a couple of test events to test with tomorrow.

Comment 5

[WaltS48 [:walts48]]

I did my test with Provider for Google Calendar version 4.4.2, TB 60.8.0, Lightning 6.2.8 on Ubuntu 18.04.2.

Created an event for 7/22/2019 that started at 11:30 AM with a reminder 5 minutes before.
The reminder triggered and I "Dismissed" it.

Created an event for 7/23/2019 that started at 9:00 AM with a reminder 5 minutes before.
The reminder triggered, but I did not see the event from yesterday.
I "Dismissed" that alarm.

Is dismissing it the same as missing an event? I'm sure that if I didn't use Thunderbird for a couple days and had events scheduled the alarm notification would appear.

Seems to me dismissing an event is the same as telling Lightning to forget about it.

Comment 6

[Robert Hartmann]

(In reply to Wayne Mery (:wsmwk) from comment #2)

(In reply to Bas van den Bosch from comment #1)

see bug 496889 and bug 276585 which want the pposite. According to bug
496889 comment 5 ther's a preference "calendar.alarms.showmissed" which can
be set. Does this work for you?

empire, does this work for you?

I tested the versions (TB 118 beta, TB119 daily) mentioned in Bug 1850732 comment 17 :
Changing "calendar.alarms.showmissed" to "false" let ignore appointment reminders from the very past.
Perhaps that should be the default value?

It is nonsense to be reminded of long past dates when importing a calendar.
Maybe here should be reminded at most of appointments (a) which are in future, (b) in which one can still participate with delay.
But it should still be possible to get a listing of all appointments.
(In TB 118 beta and TB 119.0a1 (2023-09-15) you cannot get a list of all appointments anymore.)

Comment 7

[Robert Hartmann]

(In reply to [e-mail] from comment #0)

This renders the alarm system useless because you lose many important tasks
if you do not get informed/alarmed that they have been past due.

(In reply to Robert Hartmann from comment #6)

Changing "calendar.alarms.showmissed" to "false" let ignore appointment reminders from the very past.
Perhaps that should be the default value?

It is nonsense to be reminded of long past dates when importing a calendar.
Maybe here should be reminded at most of appointments (a) which are in future, (b) in which one can still participate with delay.
But it should still be possible to get a listing of all appointments.
(In TB 118 beta and TB 119.0a1 (2023-09-15) you cannot get a list of all appointments anymore.)

Perhaps the best solution would be, a checkbox which can change the notification behavior for just imported appointment?