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If I attach an iCalendar file to an email, not a meeting or appointment but as an email with an attachment, is there any way I can be notified of responses/acceptances?

Martijn Pieters
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James Lee
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  • given your tags, is the question only for outlook-calendar or any email / calendar client? Also is your iCalendar file expected to have more than one event? More fundamentaly, why not just make use of the meeting appointment features, what is the use case behind? – Auberon Vacher Feb 13 '13 at 05:23

1 Answers1

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Maybe. iCalendar is a file format that is opened by another program (such as Google Calendar, iCal, etc) which processes the file.

For example, this could be the contents of the file:

BEGIN:VCALENDAR
VERSION:2.0
PRODID:-//hacksw/handcal//NONSGML v1.0//EN
BEGIN:VEVENT
UID:uid1@example.com
DTSTAMP:19970714T170000Z
ORGANIZER;CN=John Doe:MAILTO:john.doe@example.com
DTSTART:19970714T170000Z
DTEND:19970715T035959Z
SUMMARY:Bastille Day Party
END:VEVENT
END:VCALENDAR

There's no way to embed a network call directly back to another service in the file to acknowledge acceptance of the iCalendar invite, like you embed <img/> pixels in emails which call back to a server for email analytics. However, it does support multiple "Relationship Component Properties". For your purpose, the most important field seems to be "Attendee" (Section 4.8.4.1 in the spec). This section might look like:

 ORGANIZER:MAILTO:jsmith@host1.com
 ATTENDEE;MEMBER="MAILTO:DEV-GROUP@host2.com":
  MAILTO:joecool@host2.com
 ATTENDEE;DELEGATED-FROM="MAILTO:immud@host3.com":
  MAILTO:ildoit@host1.com

However, I believe its up to the client (like iCal) to parse the information out and use it for notifying of acceptances. So you may get notifications of acceptances from some people but not others, depending on their calendar client of choice.

Cody A. Ray
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