iCloud Calender and task in Mozilla Thunderbird/Lightning

Question

Does anyone know how i can get the calender and tasks from iCloud to Mozilla Thunderbird/Lightning - and tey are editable?

I know how to make a public agenda in iCloud, but that agenda is read only.

I hope anyone can help ....

Kerrin

Answer 1

After a lot of research i have found an solution.

This is provided by https://icloud.niftyside.com/

They have a php script, where you can fill in the credentials and the right CardDAV/Contacts servers, which you can add to Mozilla Thunderbird/Lightning

Kerrin

Thanks a lot! Worked fine for me. Just had to disable the two-phase authentication to iCloud to be able to run the script (not sure if it needs to be on for the calendar sync to work, yet) – Isaisaac

Answer 2

There is a German solution that has recently worked for me, while Ronny's link does unfortunately not work since I just do not get any responses from the server: https://www.nico-beuermann.de/blogging/archives/115-Zugriff-auf-iCloud-Kalender-mit-Thunderbird.html

You will need three ingredients for Thunderbird:

a. your calendar's server (especially, the number xx in pxx-caldav.icloud.com)

b. your user ID (dsid)

c. the calendar's UID (guid)

In short (and English):

1. Logging in to your iCloud calendar in the browser is the first important step

You can either use Firefox' or Chrome's functionality to look at the network; I will continue with Chrome for this explanation.

2. Press Ctrl + Shift + I and click on the Network tab; it might be that it is empty for now since logging might also start after pressing Ctrl + Shift + I; if it is empty, just reload having the network tab still open

3. In my case, it was helpful to right-click on a column to additionally show the domain

4. checking the domain or just hovering over the links, you can find the xx in pxx, this is your specific server; the remainder of the domain does not matter (information a)

5. I then clicked on one entry with domain pxx-calendarws.icloud.com

6. in the upcoming new sub-window, you can click on Headers and find dsid somewhere below under Query string parameters; alternatively, you can find it in the URL; dsid corresponds to your user id (information b)

7. now, switch from "Headers" to "Reponse"; you might need to check multiple URL get lines to find one with the right response, but you will find a number of guid entries which correspond to your calendar IDs (information c)

Now, you have all three pieces of information. In Thunderbird with the Calendar plugin Lightning, now add a network calendar of type "CalDAV" (iCalendar will not work!). There, you can enter the following url with the pieces of information marked in bold:

https://pxx-caldav.icloud.com/dsid/calendars/guid

Et voìla. You will need to enter your credentials for iCloud. This has worked at the date of this post with Thunderbird 45.8.0 with Lightning 4.7.8.

Update 18 July 2017: Apparently, sometime in June Apple has changed something with the system. You need to activate two-factor authentication now in order to create app-specific passwords. You can do that with any of your apple devices. Then, you should log in to your apple account. In the security area, you can generate some password. Use this one to login to your caldav in Thunderbird with your email address. This seems to work fine.

Without two-factor authentication, you cannot activate app-specific passwords. And without an app-specific password, CalDAV does not seem to be accessible anymore.

Update 05 September 2017: It seems that pGuid sometimes works but guid does not for the calendar ID. So, take care here.

Clark

I had to add "/calendars/" between dsid and guid as described by Nico. – Paluas

Another information you may want to add: You don't need to disable two-factor authentication. You can add a app-specific password as Jens pointed out in the comments of Nicos blog. See support.apple.com/en-us/HT204397 for setup instructions. At least this worked for me. – Paluas