# Accepting Outlook Invites from Apple Mail


By Ben Ramsey

Published on June 8, 2007


I've been using [Thunderbird](https://www.mozilla.org/en-US/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 <abbr title="Outlook Web Access">OWA</abbr> 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](http://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/fugly). The root of the problem is that I use a Mac. I could choose to use OWA or [Entourage](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Microsoft_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](https://www.mozilla.org/en-US/projects/calendar/) 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](http://web.archive.org/web/20070823092906/http://www.macosxhints.com/article.php?story=20060821073102694) 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…