Google Calendar is not recognizing VALARMs from .ics files when importing. Consider the calendar below with one event and a reminder. Everything imports fine except for the reminder email - (specified by the VALARM section), which is ignored by the import.
BEGIN:VCALENDAR
VERSION:2.0
PRODID:Recurring
BEGIN:VEVENT
DTSTART:20160408T231500
SUMMARY:Groceries
DESCRIPTION:Get food
BEGIN:VALARM
ACTION:EMAIL
DESCRIPTION:This is an event reminder
SUMMARY:Alarm notification
ATTENDEE:mailto:[email protected]
TRIGGER:-P0DT0H30M0S
END:VALARM
END:VEVENT
END:VCALENDAR
Found a solution.
Was it fixing newline characters? No.
Was it adding a UID? No.
Was it adding a DTSTART attribute? No.
The same .ics file must be imported twice before Google Calendar will honor the VALARM notifiers.
Event details will be imported on the first import. The second import will import the alarms. Ugh...
Sorry about the tinge of frustration. It was by dumb luck I found the solution buried in an obscure reply on one of the Google Calendar forum threads.