Google account (mail / calendar) not syncing in Windows 10
I’m having a problem with the default Mail and Calendar apps in Windows 10. For a while I was able to sync my Google account emails (Gmail) and calendar in those apps, but about a week ago, it has stopped working: the calendar is empty (no events, and no calendars listed), and the emails that were already synced are still there, but syncing doesn’t bring any new email.
I tried deleting my Google account from the mail (or calendar) app, by going to “settings -> accounts”, and then re-creating the account. I did that three times. Each time I was able to complete the following steps:
- enter my Gmail address,
- then my Google account password,
- then the confirmation code sent by SMS,
- and finally got to the screen “Windows would like to…” (permissions listing), on which I clicked “Accept” (obviously).
The first time, I then got a Windows message “Something went wrong”, followed by an error code (I didn’t write it down).
The second time, I didn’t get this error message, so it looked like the account was successfully created (it appeared in my accounts list in the settings of those apps), but nothing was synced: both apps (mail / calendar) remained empty. (I tried syncing manually by clicking the sync button in the mail app: still nothing, even though the app confirmed that it was “up to date”.)
For my third attempt, I had found this question, so I went and created an “app password” in my Google account, specifically for those apps. But when I got to the password screen (step 2 described above) and entered this app password instead of my regular account password, I got an error message (from Google) asking me to enter my account password and not an app password. So I did that, and that got me exactly the same result as my second attempt (account created but nothing synced).
I also tried both answers given on the same question (first via “settings > accounts > add account > Other account”, and second via “settings > accounts > add account > Advanced setup”), but none of them worked for me (again, account created but nothing synced).
Has anyone experienced the same problems? How can I make this work?
UPDATE: a few months back (early October 2022) I received an email from Microsoft inviting me to “reconnect to Google” (that was the title of the email). I ignored it for a while, but recently followed the steps in this email and now everything seems to be working fine. So I’m guessing that MS somehow fixed whatever bug it was.