Getting events in iCalendar from other systems

The iPhone calendar just displays the contents of calendar databases that are hosted on your email server or servers. Depending on your email provider you can share your calendar with other people. The method is different for each calendar provider. For iCloud calendars, you can share your calendar with anyone you want to. They can add events to the calendar that you share with them.

RickCampy wrote:

Thanks Lawrence, you are saying that when I enter an event in iCalendar manually, it is stored in my email server. Wouldn’t an iCloud mail server be the only email server at that point? It shows up on all my devices.

So, there is no way to send an event to iCalendar from an external mail server or client.

It’s up to you as to how many email accounts and calendars you have on your phone. I have 7 email accounts on my iPhone, and 3 of them also have calendars enabled.

If your iCloud account is your only email account that has Calendar enabled (you can check by going to Settings/Calendar/Accounts and see which accounts have calendars turned on) then the way to let people add things to your calendar is to share your iCloud calendar with them. They won’t send email, they will just add events to your calendar.

If you want a more general purpose calendar that is not Apple-centric create a shared Google calendar.

There is no way to automatically update a calendar with email, however, people can send you email invitations, and when you open them you have the option to add them to your calendar. You probably wouldn’t want things to be added automatically to your calendar, because it would rapidly fill up your calendar with spam messages.