I recently setup iCloud Mail and Calendar in an attempt to move off of Google’s services. Mail is working well, but for some reason, iCloud Calendar is not working well with invitations and makes this service essentially unusable for me.
If I send an e-mail invitation to someone, they receive the event as being organized by a random address like “2_sidnfbrksoanrfjo@imip.me.com”, rather than my email address.
If I receive an e-mail invitation from someone, it does not populate in my iCloud Calendar, but rather sends me an e-mail address with an ICS file. Thus, even if I add the ICS file to my calendar, the other party will not get notified if I accept/decline the event.
I have tried using both my default iCloud domain and custom domain. In my iCloud settings, both Mail and Calendar are enabled and turned on, and within Calendar settings, I have “Notifications” turned on for the Receiving section as well. Has anyone else encountered these problems and/or have a solution? The way Calendar handles invitations essentially makes the platform unusable for me, so any suggestions would be great. Thanks!
With #2, the behavior you report is what happens to me, I have to click the ICS file which then takes me to Calendar and then if I look in the "invitations" section of Calendar (tiny icon, like an inbox, top left) there is the option to Accept / Decline. BUT I have done a few online meetings this week and confirmed with the meeting organisers that the Accept / Decline absolutely does notify the other party (in the Sent box of Mail is an accept/decline e-mail sent to the organiser with an ICS file attached confirming the response which I assume can be parsed by Outlook or whatever they are using).
There used to be a way of automatically putting ICS attachments in Calendar (or iCal back in the day) - there was a tick box in Mail - but this feature is long gone with MacOS updates. As far as I am aware there is no way of making it populate automatically as you'd like. Sorry to be the bearer of bad news but probably not worth wasting more time on it.
