Many people arrive at Spectacled already paying for a good email provider – one of the privacy-focused, European, standards-respecting ones that also offers a calendar over CalDAV. The natural assumption is that this account will work with all three Spectacled apps.
We expected a simple answer here: tasks yes, notes and journals no, across the board. Testing produced something far less tidy. One provider does everything well, one does half the job, and two cannot be used with Spectacled at all – despite advertising CalDAV support.
What Spectacled needs
Your entries live on a CalDAV server as ordinary iCalendar data, and Spectacled uses two kinds of entry: Tasks needs the standard’s to-do type (VTODO), while Notes and Journals need its journal type (VJOURNAL). The journal type is the one most calendar systems never implemented. Our article on Google, Microsoft and iCloud explains this in more detail.
There is a second requirement that turned out to matter just as much, and which we had underestimated: you need to be able to create a folder of the right kind. Some providers only let you create calendars in their own web interface, and those calendars are fixed as events-only. That closes the door no matter what the server itself could do.
Results
| Provider | Tasks | Notes | Journals | Verdict |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Fastmail | ✅ | ✅ | ✅ | Works fully |
| Infomaniak | ✅ | ❌ | ❌ | Tasks only |
| Mailfence | ❌ | ❌ | ❌ | Not usable |
| Posteo | ❌ | ❌ | ❌ | Not usable |
Fastmail: works, and works well
Fastmail is the happy surprise. All three apps – Tasks, Notes and Journals – work against a Fastmail account, with no workarounds. Its CalDAV implementation handles journals properly, which almost nothing else in this category does.
If you are already a Fastmail customer, you need nothing else: your existing account is a complete Spectacled server. And if you are shopping for an email provider and also want your notes and journals in the same place, Fastmail is a genuinely good option on these grounds alone.
Infomaniak: tasks only, and a fiddly login
Infomaniak works for Spectacled Tasks. Notes and Journals are not supported.
There is also a setup detail worth knowing before you start, because it will otherwise look like your password is wrong: the username for CalDAV is not the one you use to sign in to the Infomaniak web interface. Infomaniak issues a separate identifier for calendar access, and that is the one Spectacled needs.
On a computer open https://config.infomaniak.com/ and login to your account. Click on the calendar and then on “Synchronise your calendars on all your devices” on the menu on the left. Choose “On this device” and “My Contacts & Calendar” as well as “Manual synchronization” to find your CalDAV username.
Once you have the right username, Spectacled Tasks connects normally.
Mailfence and Posteo: not usable
These two are the disappointing cases, and they fail for the same reason – which is not the reason we expected.
Both offer CalDAV, and in principle the connection works. The problem is the folders. On both services, new calendars can only be created through the provider’s own web interface, and the calendars it creates hold appointments only. They cannot hold tasks, and they cannot hold notes or journal entries. Spectacled connects, asks what is available, and correctly finds nothing it can use.
That means there is no route to a working setup – not for Notes, not for Journals, and not even for Tasks.
To be clear, this is not a judgement on either service as an email provider. Both are well regarded and both do what they set out to do. They are simply not usable as a Spectacled server.
The lesson for any provider
If you are evaluating an e-mail provider we have not tested, two questions matter, and the second is the one people forget:
- Does it support journals? Most don’t. Without this, Notes and Journals are out, whatever else is true.
- Can you create a folder that holds tasks or journals? If the provider only lets you create calendars through its own web interface, you get whatever that interface makes – and that is usually appointments only.
The quickest way to find out is to add the account in Spectacled and look at the list of folders it offers. The app asks the server what it can actually store and shows only what qualifies. Create a new folder and see if it works.
If your provider doesn’t work
You do not have to leave it. The three Spectacled apps are separate, and each can hold more than one account, so a perfectly reasonable setup is to keep your email provider for what it does well and add a second, free CalDAV account for the rest.
For an Infomaniak user that means Tasks on Infomaniak and Notes and Journals elsewhere. For a Mailfence or Posteo user it means your email stays exactly where it is, and Spectacled talks to a different server entirely. Either way, you are adding something rather than migrating anything.
Several of the providers Spectacled suggests have free tiers, and notes and journal entries are small. Our Nextcloud article covers how those accounts work; if you would rather run your own, Baïkal and Radicale both do the job.
In short
Fastmail is the one email provider we can recommend without hesitation for all three apps. Infomaniak works for Tasks if you can find the right username. Mailfence and Posteo, despite supporting CalDAV, cannot be used with Spectacled at all.
Tested Spectacled against a provider we haven’t covered yet? Let us know – reports from users are how this series grows.
Leave a Reply