Fix missing Google calendars in Evolution / CalDAV

Google Calendar and Evolution Sync

Me and my wife both use Google calendars to organize our daily schedule. Also, we share these calendars with each other, to see each other’s appointments. This way, we do not clash each other’s plans by accepting appointments in the same, concurrent time slots.

Recently, we found that not all of her calendars were offered to me in Evolution. After some digging, I found the solution and I’m going to explain it in this article.

Since some people in charge (note that I did not mention “we” ?) decided to switch to Office365, I need to use Evolution PIM on my Linux machine to have a slightly enjoyable Exchange-experience, at least. The other solutions, like DavMail for example, worked basically but proved to be too error-prone and slow for my taste; more often than never, Mails I archived in Thunderbird with DavMail in between showed up again after some Minutes and it took ages for any action.
However, somehow I could not select all of these foreign “shared” calendars, my wife shared with me – they simply were not listed in the select dialogue.

How to solve this

I finally found the solution to this issue here: It turned out that it’s not Evolution’s fault; instead, Google does not advertise (list) these calendars by default. You first have to change this (quite confusing) default setting at the following location:

https://www.google.com/calendar/syncselect

Please mind the lower list on that page; this should be a complete list of calendars shared with you. Select those you want to be able to access in CalDAV based clients (including Evolution) and save your selection. Your changes should be effective, immediately.

I hope this is helpful to some – Please let me know in the comments✌