The new alarm system lets you enter an email address for email reminders.

See request 3411.

I consider everything going beyond that as overhead and too 
complicated for the regular user.

Okay, but the key part of identities, that sets them apart from 
preferences, is that you can have more than one of them. You didn't 
say anything about how that would relate to calendar or task entries.

Here is my thinking on tying Identies to anything:



It is a collection of relevant preferences that help specify how you 
interact with a specific application and in most cases, a specific 
object in that application.  For instance, it's how you personalize 
the portal page - "Welcome, fullname".  It's how you tie a name and an 
address to the composition of an email or a reply to an email.  You 
add your signature to an email using an Identity.  So, in much the 
same way that you tie your name and email address and signature when 
interacting with IMP, it makes sense to tie whatever you use to 
receive notifications (email, pager, IM, Blackberry, SMS, whatever) to 
your identity, so that other applications can use that to interact 
with you.



Now none of that support currently exists for Kronolith and 
notifications in Nag are handled differently.  So I see adding a 
preference to allow the selection of an Identity in Kronolith as a 
baby step.  It would be useful to have it on a per-share, and probably 
a per-event basis - think a shared email account (maybe tech support) 
with one group calendar, events/tasks are displayed on the calendar 
and the alarm triggers for the event/task and sends a notification to 
the identity tied to the event/task.  Each member carries their own 
pager, so notifications could go to any of those, based on the 
reminder_addr.



Thinking about an Identity another way - its one facet of what your 
own entry might look like in Turba - your name, your email, your 
mobile, your FB entry, and for each application, its the relevant 
parts of your equivalent Turba entry.

This part does not make sense to me. We don't associate events with 
identities, so how would I pick which identity gets selected for 
reminders for event "foo"?
This makes sense to me, sort of. There isn't a need for a whole set of 
identity information for just a reminder preference.



So really all that's needed for the basics is a single preference 
holding a single address to send reminders to.



For a more elaborate solution, we need a more comprehensive set of 
settings for which calendars a user wants reminders for (along with 
tasks, etc.), and different methods for sending the reminder (sms, 
jabber, email, etc).

I have a patch that is currently a work-in-progress for this, but I 
think it really amounts to two separate and valid issues.



Tying a different email address to a reminder address isn't an 
unreasonable request, so I'm working on a new preference for an 
Identity called "reminder_addr" that lets a user specify a different 
address to receive reminders at (Blackberry, SMS, etc.)



Then, the idea of allowing a choice of which identity to use should be 
handled by a "reminder_identity" preference, that lets the user choose 
which identity to use when sending/receiving reminders.



I extended the Identity class through Kronolith to do this, with the 
idea of maybe adding some additional functions in the future to make 
things like Free/Busy work a little smoother out of the box.



Per my note to the mailing list, I spun my wheels on the cached email 
results for the Schedule class for awhile today, so what I have isn't 
ready for initial review.  But I think both of the request of this 
ticket could be honored and are valid.

That doesn't fit in Horde's architecture, but it would make sense to 
add a preference to Kronolith that allows to select the identity that 
should be used to send reminders and invitations.

It would be great if you could use your custom mail adress for the 
reminders. Then it would be possible to enter the address of a 
mail-2-sms-Gateway for example and you could be reminded via SMS.

That's the only way reminders make sense (in my opinion)