I have been using eM Client for managing my iCloud calendar successfully for a while now with entries created in eM Client syncing correctly to and from iCloud devices (e.g. browser/iPhone/iPad). But up until now, I have not used meeting invites. When I put someone’s email address into the invitees field, it doesn’t prompt me to send an invite and so no invite is sent.
If I create a calendar entry on icloud.com, the invite is sent and the response comes back into my inbox. However, the response email says “You have been sent a participation status reply from an attendee for scheduled items which were not found. It will be ignored.” The iCloud calendar entry shows correctly in eM Client complete with the invitee’s email address, although it shows “needs action” against their name.
How can I get eM Client to send out the invites and recognise the responses when they come back? And, importantly, send meeting updates if I change a meeting’s details.
No solution i’m afraid. The only workaround I’ve found is to install the MS Outlook app on my iPad/iPhone and create meetings there if I want to invite anyone to them. Thankfully, I don’t generally have to invite people to the entries in my calendar but I guess that would be a pretty rubbish solution for other people. I even did some experimenting with other calendar apps (e.g. WeekCal on iOS, browser-based iCloud, Windows-based Outlook) and nothing seems to work consistently - sometimes it’s OK but not always.
I shall contact them. But is there some way in which the MS iOS Outlook app is communicating with the iCloud servers differently to how eMClient does? They’re both hitting the same CalDav account.
I spent a couple of hours on the phone with Apple yesterday. They suggested updating all my iOS and MacOS versions to the latest versions even though that didn’t explain why non-Apple technology was generating the same issues … but that’s what Apple tech support always seem to suggest as the cure for (in their words) “90% of the problems”, and of course they won’t talk to you any more until you do so. Well, this problem is in the remaining 10% as I expected.
Anyway, another day of experimenting leads me to the conclusion that maybe it’s to do with whether the email address to which I’m sending the invite is used as an Apple ID. Example: my wife’s work email address is used for her email inbox on MS Outlook (Outlook 365 I think or something server-based anyway). The same email address is used as the Apple ID on her work iPhone. What seems to happen (and this is documented in other threads on other sites) is that when a calender invite passes through iCloud (whether generated by an Apple app or something else like eM Client), then iCloud recognises it as an Apple ID and routes it to Apple apps as in-app notifications rather than sending it as an email meeting invite. Sure enough, when I looked at the Calendar app on her work iPhone, there were all the missing invites. She never uses the Apple Calendar app and so never saw them before.
There is an option in the browser-based iCloud that forces invites to be sent to an email address rather than be sent as an in-app notification. I shall try to set this but I fear that even if I manage to get it come across as an email, it’s still going to want to put it into the iCloud calendar rather than the Outlook one - I don’t know until I try.
I guess the reason it works when I create the meetings in iOS Outlook is that maybe it recognises it as an Outlook email address and hijacks it before iCloud can do so, or maybe it lets iCloud do its thing and then sends an email invite as well.
I also investigated not using iCloud for my calendar and using Yahoo, Google or outlook.com calendars instead as a cloud-based storage mechanism. However, for various reasons it didn’t work very well.
In your scenario, the invitation is generated by iCloud, not eM Client.
You could try creating the event using another calendar provider, or creating the event in Local Folders. Only when using Local Folders will the invitation will be generated by eM Client.