Troubleshooting Meeting Invitation Issues

Receiving meeting invitations from others doesn't always go smoothly. While some issues are easy to resolve, others may be unavoidable due to external factors. Below is a non-exhaustive list of common problems you might encounter and tips for troubleshooting or circumventing them effectively:

Not Seeing Accept / Decline / Response Options

Reason 1: Mismatch of Email Addresses

This issue occurs when the sender (i.e., the organizer) uses an email address to send you an invitation, but the receiving address doesn’t match the one associated with your calendar account. For example, if you add a CalDAV account to BusyCal with the email address bob@email.com, but your email server is configured with aliases like bobby@email.com or robert@email.com, BusyCal may not recognize these aliases. Many servers do not share additional aliases with third-party apps.

When such an invitation reaches your calendar and is viewed in BusyCal, the app marks the event as "read-only" and prevents you from responding because it cannot match the attendee bobby@email.com with the account bob@email.com.

Solution:

1. Request others to send invites to bob@email.com directly, or
2. Sign in to your calendar account within BusyCal using bobby@email.com if that’s an option, or
3. Open Apple Contacts, edit your Me Card, and add any additional aliases. BusyCal will reference your Me Card
4. to match email addresses and allow you to respond to meeting invitations.

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Reason 2: Invitation (.ics File) Was Manually Imported

If the meeting invitation was manually imported into BusyCal, perhaps from an email attachment, and the email address it was sent to doesn’t match the calendar account where it was imported, you won’t be presented with any response options.

Solution:

1. Open Apple Contacts, edit your Me Card, and add all your email addresses (including aliases).
   This helps BusyCal identify you as an attendee and enables response options for imported invitations.
2. Ensure that invitations are not manually imported when they can sync directly through your calendar account.

Meeting Responses Not Updating

If you're the organizer and attendees are sending replies, but your meeting invitations aren’t reflecting their responses (e.g., you always see a question mark next to their email addresses in the event details section), this may be due to configuration issues at the sender's end or one of the following scenarios:

• Shared Email Across Services:
  You’re using an email address for your calendar account that’s shared across multiple services. For example, you’re using an iCloud account, but your email address is actually a Gmail address, like tom.joe@gmail.com. In such cases, emails sent to this address may reach your Gmail Inbox or Calendar instead of iCloud.

• Mismatched Services:
  Similar issues can arise when accounts use email domains from one service but are hosted by another—for example, an Outlook account with a Yahoo domain or vice versa. These mismatches often lead to confusion when sending and receiving invitations.

• Cross-Service Interference:
  If the sender or recipient is using email accounts hosted by different services, it may cause interference or misrouting of meeting invitations and responses.

Key Notes

• This behavior isn’t specific to BusyCal. You’ll likely see the same issue in other calendar apps.
• Identifying the root cause requires collaboration with your attendees, as well as checking your account’s online portal, where the issue may also appear.

Unfortunately, resolving these issues often involves configurations outside the scope of what we can troubleshoot directly.

Not Receiving Meeting Invitations From Others

When a meeting is sent out from a service such as iCloud, Google, Outlook or Exchange, the invitation is delivered by that server - not the third party app the sender may be using. If a recipient (such as yourself) isn’t receiving invites:

• Check the Spam or Trash folder in the mail app
• For Exchange users, the invite may appear in the Inbox folder of the calendar. There may be a setting preventing these from appearing on the calendar itself.
• If the recipient uses an iCloud account with a Gmail or Outlook address, the invite may be intercepted by those services and not reach iCloud, as highlighted in the section above.

Google Calendar Users

For Google calendar, there is a setting that can be disabled inadvertently which would prevent invitations from appearing in the calendar automatically. This setting can be enabled in your Google account settings.

Avoid Manually Importing .ics Files

As a general rule, you should avoid importing .ics files manually when using accounts with iCloud, Google, Outlook etc. Meeting invitations show up on your calendar automatically during sync. Whenever an invitation is received, it is captured in two places: the Mail Inbox and the Calendar Inbox. If you import the .ics file sent as an attachment via mail manually, and don't wait for the calendar to sync this automatically, conflicts can occur and these can further complicate matters as updates may or may not be sent out correctly. Some servers, such as Google Calendar, can be extremely picky when it comes to meeting invitations and related conflicts. In the worse case you may also end up with duplicate meetings.

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