Hello,
New user here.
Can you tell me if I can set a Cryptpad calendar in such a way that I can automatically upload calendars from Thunderbird up to it?
Is it then possible to propose a link such that external client instances (of Thunderbird for example) can automatically download it?
TIA -and all the best for Cryptpad!
Hervé
Hello @RV5 and welcome.
a) CryptPad is (open source) end-to-end encrypted, that is the main reason to use it. The encryption and decryption is done in your browser, which means your browser is executing CryptPad code to do so.
b) CryptPad has no API for external applications. As I have read this might be possible sometime in the future but depends on funding of course.
You can only manually import calendars, because 1) there is no API and 2) there is no (automation) feature in CryptPad to automatically "fetch" the data.
This is not possible because of the end-to-end encryption. Whatever an external client theoretically could download would be unusable encrypted data. So the external client would either need a feature to decrypt CryptPad data (unlikely) and you would need to enter your password or you would need the not existing API for external applications.
IMHO sync features (API) is one of the most wanted CryptPAd features, especially for calendar, since it's easier to keep all documents (only) in CryptPad than keeping all appointments (only) in CryptPad.
So I would advise you to post a feature request (for sometiem in the future), but then please describe your workflow. If you sync your external / Thunderbird calendar with CryptPad your calendar data would not be encrypted anymore, it would be cleartext in Thunderbird / external application. So the CryptPad developers would not see your point without describing it further.
All the link features in CryptPad, by which I mean the share features, which create a link, create links to within the protected CryptPad environment. So as explained int he foreword CryptPad code is executed in your browser to handle the encrypted communication. Therefore there are no links in the sense of URLs ( like ical:// or smb:// )which one is used from other applications.
Other applications usally have no encryption feature, or the communication is encrypted, but not end-to-end, which means the data is stored unencrypted on the servers. End-to-end means your client (browser) is doing the encryption and the decryption, the server does not know your (plaintext) data.
Please look at the features to download your CryptDrive and to upload folders. I don't know if these include calendar data. If they do you could write scripts and then manually "sync" your data e.g. once a day.
If you use CryptPad because the simpleness and the included applications and with encryption only as a bonus feature you might want to look a open source applications like Nextcloud, then you have the sync features, but not the end-to-end cryptography.
Please consider adding / changing your posting tags, there is a "calendar" tag instead of the "applications" tag. Please give feedback if your questions are answered or use the feature to mark a posting as answer.
Regards
Alexander
AlexQ Thank you @AlexQ for this very detailed answer! Indeed I tried a 'calendar' tag in my question because I read info on Cryptpad calendars.
I now managed to create a calendar in a registered Cryptpad, but the .ics files I export from Thunderbird (115.16.0esr) are not read properly when I try importing them, possibly because they span over many years and are quite big (100 ~ 400K)
I'll try with shorter files...
Thank you again!
Hervé
@RV5 Sorry for the failed ics import. This would be something for a bug report, but since you will not be able to share your (private) data with the developers this would be difficult or fruitless.
Maybe try importing the big/long file to another local (opensoruce) app, so you can see, if this is a challenge in general or if the CryptPad code is too buggy.
Of course trying it with smaller files is good also for testing / narrowing down.
Thanks for your feedback, finding bugs is important. And your original feature request is of course interesting, too.
