Unable to delete calendar invites on my Calendar App after macOS Sequoia update

I have also experienced this problem. It happened to coincide with my upgrade to Sequoia...

Still no resolution but some further insights:

This issue with calendar events being automatically created with the flag "This event was imported (read-only)" seems to only occur when someone sends a calendar invite to one of our staff mailing lists that I'm part of. So my work email does not appear as part of the invite list but I'm subscribed (system-generated) to the mailing list that the event was sent to. MacOS Calendar picks up all those event invites and pushes them into my MS Exchange work calendar read-only.

I found this Apple Support article, which does not resolve the issue: "If you can’t change a calendar or event on Mac" but it hints at what the problem may be: "If you can’t change an event you created, or you can’t change your status for an event you were invited to, it might be because you’re using an email address in Calendar that isn’t on your card in Contacts. Make sure all your email addresses are listed on your Contacts card." – I haven't tried adding our work mailing lists to my contact card and doing so would be absurd and not a feasible solution.

Do any Apple software engineers actually still read these Discussion threads and could offer some advice or a fix?

I'm also experiencing this same problem and recently up graded to Sequoia.

Same issue. I've tried responding to events and deleting them and I just can't get them to go away.

Same issue here. It's importing events from my work's Microsoft Exchange email account, and they appear as "This event was imported (read-only)" and it's impossible to get rid of them. Strangely, when I open the SAME calendar in Office 365 / Outlook Calendar, those events do NOT appear (as I have declined them).

There is other people with the same issue in the Microsoft support forum, but Microsoft of course says it's Apple's problem: https://answers.microsoft.com/en-us/msoffice/forum/all/how-to-stop-automatic-read-only-calendar-events/cd6cb278-7ad6-4414-97ef-33bcd8c334ed

I have the same problem too, and I've spent *many* hours working on it.

But I don't think it's simply an Apple problem. I've talked with friends/colleagues who upgraded to Sequoia and are using an Exchange calendar through the built-in Mac Calendar app just fine.

I think it's a combination of changes apple made in Sequoia with permissions and security settings on the Exchange server side. In one way or another, the exchange server is not recognizing the MacOS Calendar app as having proper permissions to read/write to the Exchange calendar.

So either Apple needs to update Sequoia so that when you add your exchange calendar it meets the requirements on the server side, or the server-side settings need to be altered to give Sequoia calendar full access. I've tried to message my IT people who run the exchange server, but their usual response is "no."

Update: The "This event was imported (read-only)" showing on ALL Calendar Events issue seems to have been related to Exchange email aliasing and which "account" Apple sees as "active" when I joined it to exchange. And not just having that email associated to your "me" contact card.

I removed the Exchange account a second time, re-added it using my "alias" as my username, then when clicking the SSO Sign in option using the actual username/password and events now show correctly. Events sent to "me" (aka the alias) now show 'correctly' and any previous 'phantoms' from Events sent to lists have also disappeared. The latter more likely due to deleting the calendar entirely though so I'll have to see the next time I receive a list invite to see whether that functions correctly or not (I suspect it will not).

I came here to post my own solution, which is very similar to DBTubbs, but with one tweak.

The problem is that the Mac Calendar app does not recognize the invite email address as belonging to Exchange account holder. So it treats those invited events as read-only. And as DBTubbs says, you cannot fix this by editing your Apple “me” contact card. You have to make the change on the Exchange server.

In my case the issue appeared because my default University email address (where all my invites were sent) was not the same as my University-Microsoft account email address.

DBTubbs solution would NOT WORK for me. I tried to log into my exchange account using the email address to which the invites were sent, but the exchange authentication server says rejected that with the error “email address not recognized.” I can ONLY log into to exchange with one email that my University exchange account recognizes.

The solution for me:

I changed my “default email address” in a proprietary profile page that my university sets up. This changed my Exchange contact information to the same email address as I log into the exchange servers. (Note that my exchange admin prohibits users from editing their own contact card, so the only way to make this change for me was through the separate profile page.)

After that change propagated to the servers, turning OFF and back ON the exchange calendar loaded all events properly.

I found a workaround to survive. If you set yourself as a delegate in exchange account properties, another copy of your calendar appears. This time without the "imported" events, all working fine so far. All you need then is to stop showing the original calendar.

While I don't know who wrote the Exchange connector on MacOS, I am willing to bet this to be an Apple problem.

In my case, all of the 'phantom' objects are for Events that I've declined but were sent to a list address OR Events that I was listed as the "organizer" for but were NOT created in Calendar.app (either crated in OWA or MS Teams).

So I did some additional checking. ALL of the Events in my exchange account that show the "This event was imported (read-only)" message have the following things in common.

1. It does not matter whether the organizer shows as me or not

2. It does not matter whether I am in the 'To' list or received the invite as part of a list.

3. For events where I AM the Organizer, the Event was NOT created via Calendar.app.

And then did a BUNCH of testing to see what would / would not result in a 'phantom' Events that could not be deleted.

I added the mailing list email address for several 'phantom' Events to my contact card. I closed all apps after saving to Contact, verified the updated details showed up in my contact card on iCloud.com (I don't have any contacts in my exchange account and I don't think Exchange has a concept of a "me" contact card anyway), and then rebooted. I still see the events and cannot delete them.

I also noticed that I could NOT delete events where I WAS in the TO list OR where I was the organizer and the event was created outside Calendar.app (M$ Teams or OWA).

I also tested whether having an "online meeting" changed anything - it did not.

Additionally, I found that cancelling Events that I had scheduled outside of Calendar.app resulted in 'phantom' Events that still could not be deleted - even though they no longer show up in OWA, on mobile (iPhone / iPad) or M$ Teams.

Finally, for meetings that were addressed directly to me, I no longer have an option to change my response option from 'accepted' to 'decline' or 'tentative' (maybe) either. So there is no way to REMOVE ANY Events in Calendar.app any longer.

Guess I'll be using OWA and Teams for everything now.. Might as well stop using Mail.app as well since I'll have to be in OWA anyway.

Hi fronesis47

I'm also on an Exchange account that's admin'ed by my university. I'm intrigued by your suggestion to change the default email on a "proprietary profile page" – can you explain what you mean by that? My uni offers the usual Exchange desktop suite plus Office 365 on the web and a university-specific page where I change my uni-wide password every couple of weeks. But I'm not sure what you mean by "proprietary profile page"...?

I note that my official uni email is first name initial dot surname @ uni domain. But the Exchange login is just username @ uni domain, which looks like an email.

Thank you!

@Marcus

First, I’m fairly certain your issue is just like mine. Those different emails are what’s confusing the apple calendar. Somehow you need to get the exchange server either to recognize both email addresses as you, or to switch your default email address to the one you log in to exchange with.

For me, my university has an old setup that they still use by long pre-dates when they went to exchange, where you’d log in to a “my.Uni.edu” page. From there you could link to lots of different university web services – payroll stuff, course management systems, etc., and also link to Office 365 stuff. They have a page there that’s “my profile” and changes I made there propagated to the Exchange server.

You need some way of updating your exchange profile, either directly (which was blocked for me) or indirectly (which is what I did).

Good luck!

Suffering the same problem. Exchange events showing as imported read only at random. Some are ok, some are problematic. Originally It seem to be coinciding with me set as organiser. I tried to remove myself as organiser in web Outlook. Result... random :(