emacs export calendar bad timezone format in ics

Question

using orgmode I export my agenda to an ics file, upload it to my site, and import it into Google calendar. This seems like an easy ideal solution, but when I check the calendar I find that it is not recognizing the time zone of my ics file and so is assuming GMT, making my imported times uselessly off. The problem seems to be the same as the one described here:

http://blog.jonudell.net/2011/10/17/x-wr-timezone-considered-harmful/

Checking my exported ics, sure enough, it is using X-WR-TIMEZONE:EST, which Google calendar does not respect. This must be a well-known problem, but I haven't been able to locate a solution anywhere. Help would be appreciated: how can I get the right time on my events (and they must be a feed; the "add to calendar" trick is no good)?

EDIT: Google Calendar is one of those that actually does respect X-WR-TIMEZONE. The problem was apparently that it didn't like the value. See answer below.

Answer 1

Google Calendar actually does respect X-WR tags; it just didn't like the default one it was being given. Here are the full details I've learned, starting with the fix.

SOLUTION

Google just didn't like the automatic X-WR-TIMEZONE: EST it was getting from the exported ical. I fixed this by by adding to my .emacs:

(setq org-icalendar-timezone "America/New_York")

This caused my automatic org export to produce X-WR-TIMEZONE:America/New_York and Google is happy and I'm happy.

FUTURE WORK & MORE INFO

Ultimately it would be nice to have fully standards-compliant output from the process. The problem is not in emacs' icalendar.el, but actually in org-icalendar-start-file in org-icalendar.el. The code for outputting the ical header uses X-WR tags. As of May 2014, I expect this will be fixed soon.