Accepting Outlook Invites from Apple Mail
I’ve been using Thunderbird for quite some time for company e-mail, and for the most part, I’ve been happy with it, but when the company uses Microsoft Exchange Server for shared calendars and scheduling, anyone that’s not using Outlook on a PC gets left out in the cold. Keeping track of my schedule has been the source of increasing frustration. Our recommended solution is to simply use OWA to accept all calendar invitations. However, this defeats the purpose of using Thunderbird in the first place, and if you use a browser other than Internet Explorer, your experience is severely limited and downright fugly. The root of the problem is that I use a Mac. I could choose to use OWA or Entourage, but OWA is simply unacceptable, and Entourage is clunky and slow at best.
I don’t want to ramble too much longer before getting to the point, but I’ll just say: Thunderbird’s Lightning extension is also fugly and also doesn’t appear to recognize many calendar invitations. For those it did recognize, I couldn’t add them to the calendar.
Finally, I decided to try the combination of Apple Mail and iCal, but, again, I encountered problems. Some calendar invites included the proper .ICS calendar attachments, while others appeared not to have the .ICS attachment. However, this was misleading since the VCALENDAR data is clearly in the raw message source and the message includes the Content-Class header with a value of “urn:content-classes:calendarmessage.” What?! Why can’t Apple Mail read it?
Nevertheless, after some searching, I came across a nice AppleScript that will detect the calendar message and automatically add it to iCal for you to accept/reject. Your acceptance of the message still doesn’t communicate with the Exchange server, so others can’t see your free/busy times, but it does send an e-mail to the person who scheduled the event, and it gives me peace of mind knowing that iCal will notify me every time I have a meeting and I won’t miss any more. :-)
After several years and many nice updates, I wonder why Apple Mail still has problems accepting Outlook calendar invitations…
6 Comments
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Groupcal
I've been using it for quite some time with a great deal of success. (I'm not affiliated with Snerdware, just love their product)
Ben: I share your pain. I use Entourage, for the sole reason of being compatible with my coworkers on Windows, and find it to be a huge pain to use. I'd suggest Gmail (and the G. calendar), but that gets back into the problem of fugliness.
David: Thanks for the link! I downloaded Groupcal and tested the trial version. It absolutely suits my needs, and it means that others can easily schedule meetings with me! It's $60, but that's well worth it!
dudes, finally -- accepting Outlook invites has been my last hold out with Entourage; especially, after getting my iPhone. The response to that script that says, "previous alternative" does it. That rules and I had no idea that was there.
Check out reminderFox
http://reminderfox.mozdev.org/
after adding it in to Thunderbird you can right click on an ICS file (outlook meeting invite) and add it to a reminder list. Almost as good as adding to the calendar
Hi Guys,
Been dealing with a similar issue for about 3 years now, so I know your pain. Apple will not solve this problem because they're a stickler for standards, no matter what the rest of the world really needs. Since I'm a developer at heart, I decided to tackle the problem on my own and built a software product cal Zamain for Mac to resolve the Apple iCal to Microsoft Outlook/Exchange incompatibilities. I originally built the product for myself, but soon realized that this can help others as well. Here are the major issues that Zamain for Mac resolves:
Supports sending Apple iCal invitations from multiple Apple Mail email accounts
Resolves the "unable to Accept" Apple iCal invitations sent to Microsoft Outlook/Exchange recipients
Resolves incorrect time zones for Microsoft Outlook/Exchange recipients
Prevents multiple attachments when viewing Apple iCal invitation emails in Microsoft Outlook
Although I know that this is a shameless plug for my product, I urge you to give it a try because it will really make your life easier. I have been using it every day for past 6 months and I can tell you that it saved me a lot of grief.
You can get Zamain for Mac at www.zamain.com.
Thanks!
-Jon