New GNOME API key for Google services

Tl;dr: update evolution-data-server to stop your client from misbehaving; update gnome-online-accounts to shield yourself from other buggy clients.

Recently, a few bugs in evolution-data-server were causing various GNOME components to hit Google’s daily limit for their CalDAV and Tasks APIs. At least evolution, gnome-calendar and gnome-todo were affected. The bugs have since been fixed, but until every single user out there installs the fix, everybody will be susceptible even if they have a fixed copy of evolution-data-server. This is because Google identifies the clients by the OAuth 2.0 API key used to access their services, and not the version of the code running on them.

We are therefore phasing out the old Google API key used by GNOME so that users updating their systems will have no connection to the one that was tainted by these bugs.

Fedora Users

If you are using Fedora 25, make sure you have evolution-data-server-3.22.3-1.fc25 and gnome-online-accounts-3.22.3-1.fc25. For Fedora 24, the versions are evolution-data-server-3.20.6-1.fc24 and gnome-online-accounts-3.20.5-1.fc24.

GNOME Distributors

If you are distributing GNOME, make sure that you are shipping evolution-data-server-3.22.3 and gnome-online-accounts-3.22.3, or evolution-data-server-3.20.6 and gnome-online-accounts-3.20.5.

GNOME Online Accounts and IMAP / SMTP

Starting from GNOME 3.7.91, you can configure your IMAP/SMTP accounts via GNOME’s single sign-on framework and then use them from Evolution.

Many thanks to Matthew Barnes for making the required adjustments in Evolution Data Server and making sure that it landed in time for the 3.8.0 release later this month.

GNOME meets ownCloud

Now that we are in the middle of the various freezes in preparation for GNOME 3.8, it is a good time to talk about some of the things that happened over the last six months. One such thing is the integration of ownCloud in GNOME. Go to the Online Accounts panel in Settings (hit the super key or the Activities button and type “online”) to enable your ownCloud account, and you will be able to access your calendars, contacts and files from GNOME.

Calendars and contacts can be accessed via CalDAV and CardDAV from their respective tabs in Evolution. Files in your ownCloud storage show up as volumes via WebDAV in Nautilus and GtkFileChooser.

Many thanks to Milan Crha for making the necessary changes to hook up Evolution with ownCloud in time for 3.8.0.