Hi Dave. I used to get email letting me know when I was invited to events on Google Calendar, but now they never show up. And I miss meetings! How can I restore these notifications in Google Calendar?
You’re not alone in noticing that the latest update to Google Calendar seems to have disabled email notifications for event invitations. I too have the very same problem and while it’s easy to just ignore it, if you don’t use Google Calendar as your main calendar system – I use Apple Calendar instead – you’re going to find you start missing meetings and events!
It seems like the core problem is that the Google Calendar team decided that people should just use Gcal (as it used to be called) and the problem goes away. Except it doesn’t really, and in either situation, having notifications of event invitations is a clear win for being able to keep up with your calendar. Even more odd, the notification setting isn’t where you’d expect to find it…
But let’s start with Google Calendar itself. I’ll use the Web interface for simplicity. On the calendar home page – at google.com/calendar – there’s a gear icon on the top right. A click and a menu appears:
No huge surprise, you want to click on “Settings” to be able to proceed. Lots of info, but on the left side you want to ensure you click on “Event settings“. At least, that’s where you’d think the setting would be found…
Event settings give you lots of valuable options, as you can see:
But surprisingly it doesn’t offer up notification settings because those are on a per-calendar basis. Still, start by checking out some of the defaults above and make sure it’s set as you desire. Ready?
Good. Now, on the left side you’ll see a list of different calendars. It might be just your personal calendar in which case it’ll just be your name, but probably you’ll have more than one. Like this:
If I click on my personal calendar – “Dave Taylor” – then I can suddenly see quite a few different options. Most importantly, “Calendar settings“:
Choose “Calendar settings” as shown and you’ll find this set of options:
The key setting – finally!! – is “New events”. As shown above, my notifications for new events in Google Calendar is “None”. So not useful! A click and here are the options from which you can choose:
Simply choose “E-mail” and you’re done. Fixed. Not too bad, even if it’s a bit of a labyrinth to solve.
Pro Tip: While you’re here, we have lots of Google help for Gmail, and Google Plus, among many other topics. And if they don’t help, ask us a question and we’ll try to help!