Choosing iCal invite meeting organizer email address

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Level 1

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Choosing iCal invite meeting organizer email address

When you create and invite in iCal, it will get mailed as a VCALENDAR attachment. iCal seems to be scripting Mail to send the invite. By default, it seem to use the first email account in mail. Ok, so far so good. Unfortunately, in the VCALENDAR invite itself, there is a meeting organizer field (ORGANIZER;CN=). That field is getting to a value determined by iCal. Unfortunately, when you have multiple mail account on your system, iCal picks whichever one it feels like. As a results, replies to your meeting invite will get sent back to this email address, which may not be the one you want (work vs personal for instance). You can end up with a mismatch where the invite attachment is sent from one account, but the email address in the vcal attachment is for another and thus the invite attendance response will get sent there.

The question is where does iCal get this information from? Is there a way to force iCal to use a particular address as the meeting organizer?

iMac, Mac OS X (10.4.5)

Posted on Dec 12, 2007 9:30 AM

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Answer 1

Dec 12, 2007 9:57 AM in response to Georges

Interestingly enough I discovered this same problem myself today. I very carefully sent my daughter an iCal invite using my personal email address. When she replied it went to my work email. She said that she sees me twice in the invite. I looked at the organizer field and it is my work email. This is the first email listed on my card in the address book. I can't find a way to re-order those in case it is taking the first. It should set the organizer to the same as the sender in my opinion.

This will be fixed in 10.5.2, right???

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Answer 2

Dec 27, 2007 9:16 PM in response to Man of Wy

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Answer 3

Jan 2, 2008 5:20 PM in response to Georges

This is perhaps the most brain dead aspect of iCal. I constantly loose invitations and invitation responses because of this "misbehavior". The worst was when I organized a business meeting for 20 or so people and sent the invitations, only to shortly realize that they were sent from my gmail account. Most people I know heavily employ white lists, so I had to cancel and resend the invitations. I develop software so this minor mistake looks pretty bad. I now cringe every time I send an invite for work related matters.

I've read that it uses the last mail account used to send a message, but I haven't verified that.

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Answer 4

mp459

Level 1

8 points

Feb 25, 2008 12:18 PM in response to Community User

Here's another thread about this:
http://discussions.apple.com/thread.jspa?messageID=6692796

Mine was acting up but after a few tests it seems to use the first-listed address.

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Answer 5

Mar 5, 2008 9:42 AM in response to mp459

It seems to choose the first entry for your card when viewed in the Address Panel in iCal. This can order be manipulated by the order you enter addresses in Address Book. If I take out additional addresses, then save the card (the save step seems important), then add additional addresses back and save again, the first entry sticks when seen from iCal. If you look at the resulting vcard, the first one will have a "type=pref" property (at least at OS version 10.5.2).

Note you can change the order addresses are listed in Address Book by changing the new card template in the Address Book preferences, but that doesn't appear to have any bearing on the order seen by other applications.

It seems to be working for me, but is an utterly terrible user experience. Add that to the fact that it doesn't even attempt to match the sending account with the organizer when throwing the invite over the wall to Mail.app...hm...the iCal to Mail interface is just AppleScript...

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