Ever since Apple opened the beta version of Mail and iCal on MobileMe last year, my list of calendars in iCal (Calendars, not calendar entries) has been piling up.
I’ve got to the point of having more than 2000 calendars in iCal and that was causing the app on the Mac as well as on MobileMe to take such a long time in opening.
The MobileMe calendar actually would give up after several minutes and I haven’t even bothered to open iCal ever since. If I need to input anything into the calendar I would use the one on my iPhone instead and made sure it doesn’t sync with iTunes whenever I sync the iPhone.
I let my MobileMe account lapse last March and figured that would be the end of it. Having ignored iCal for months, I thought I might try Lion’s calendar for a change, completely forgetting that I have more than 2000 calendars, so it took a while to open and left me wondering until it finally opened and showed me my monster list.
I figured, okay, let’s find the proper calendars, export them to import back later and nuke the bastards so I can start iCal from fresh. Having gone through that, I opened iCal and found myself looking at a calendar app with no entries. Oh joy!.
A few minutes later, I saw that the proper calendars were already loading. Hmm, that was strange but okay, saves me from having to import them. Note that my Mac was online during all this.
After having added one new calendar and a handful of entries, the app began to slow down and wouldn’t quit unless I force quit it. And then I decided to head down to home/Library/Calendars/ where I found 2004 folders of calendars appearing out of nowhere. ZOMG ZOMBIE CALENDARS!! THEY’RE BACK FROM THE DEAD!
I realized I had lost three subscribed calendars in the process but there I was looking at 2004 calendars. Where had they come from? Can’t be MobileMe, my account is gone. So then I proceed to remove all the calendars directly from the Finder for the second time. It’s been about 30 minutes and the zombie calendars haven’t made their way back yet. We’ll see later on.
Since I no longer have access to MobileMe, I can’t see whether I can do anything on the server side from MobileMe to stop this form happening again.
It also seems that old appointments and invitations from the calendars were being resent. All the way back from 2006. How do I know this? I’ve been getting failed delivery messages of those invitations in my Gmail inbox. Why Gmail? Not sure. I thought it should have been on my mac.com address, which would have bounced.
So far I haven’t seen the zombies returning again yet but if they do, I’ll make sure to grab a screenshot and post it here.
AuliaSays 