Reminders / Notifications
 

Today I (again) missed an important meeting despite setting more than one reminder.
I had a reminder set on on the calendar event, and I also snoozed the invitation so it will reappear in the Inbox close to the start of the event, which should create a notification (which it did).



However, ever since I started using the Fastmail calendar, email notifications have degraded for me, since they are mixed with all the calendar notifications. So having a mail sent to myself has no extra value over the calendar notification.


Email messages are usually new data that I have not seen before, so I I want to be notified about some of them, it's because I want to be able to decide what to do with them when they arrive. Calendar notifications show no new data: they are just reminders I set for myself. My problem is that the FastMail app show email notifications together with calendar notifications mixed, instead of separating them. Actually what I need is a way to create some reminders that stand out. The calendar doesn't have any way to make some reminders more powerful than other reminders. To me some events are much more important than others.


I would have used the phone's alarm clock app to create a much more noticeable reminder, but it only allows setting an hour and a day in a week for recurring events, so it's not a replacement for a calendar.


I also don't see any way to determine what sound the notifications make in the android app. It seems that the only option is to use the same system alert sound that all other apps use with their useless alerts.



Any thoughts / suggestions?

One option would be to enable notifications for calendar events, but not for new emails. What I find frustrating is that you cannot selectively say you only want notifications for emails from those in your VIP list.

What app are we talking about? In the iOS app, you *can* say you want notifications for VIP contacts only. Go to Settings → Notifications, there you’ll find the options "If delivered to" to specify one or more folders/lables and "And from" where you can choose between anyone, Fastmail contacts and VIP Fastmail contacts.

I think that’s because the notifications are all from the same app, so your phone OS can’t differentiate between mail and calendar notifications. At least on iOS that’s not possible afaik.


What you could do is to connect any calendar app to your Fastmail account and then let the calendar app do the notifications for your events. Then disable calendar notifications in your Fastmail app, so you only get mail notifications from that one.