Ical LION sends cancel event - MAJOR BUG

I have been regularly dealing with this, but this week it hit a new low. I am using ical and outlook for mac with lion, so not sure where the blame lies. However, because of repeated events I decided to delete ALL old events in my calendar so people never get cancellations for events from 2009 again. I expected everyone to get notified of the cancellations hopefully for the last time (but better than repeatedly).

ANYWAYS, this time something sent out automatic emails to any email address mentioned in the note section of the event!!!! If I had cut and pasted event info from an email into the note section of my event, something scrolled through all the notes to myself, and sent the entire note as cancelled to anyone mentioned in the note section!!!! My personal notes about the event were ALSO sent to the recipient! This is very embarrassing! Luckily I don't keep nasty notes to myself (I hope - I deleted them, so I wont' even know if I did unless someone yells at me!). How in the world is this possible? These were NOT group invites - these were my own calendar entries for myself without any invites attached. But it found any email address within the event message/note and sent my ENTIRE note to these email addresses with the word "cancelled" in front of it.

I'm not sure if it is ical or outlook, but I never want to use whichever program it is again! I have now erased events from both calendars, and want to start populating one again, but not sure which one is safe. Tempted to start using paper. Anyone else have this problem? I think people should know about it so they can at least be careful about using notes in an event.

i'm also having the same (with minor variations).

when i get the email invitation. i double click on the event, it's added to ical ( i set my exchange as default), it's added there, but soon i see the invite sent from me again to all the attendees!. this is embarrasing when an exec sends the invite to lots of people, and then my ical resends it as if from me and people start accepting my invite!.

it's getting really annoying!.

is apple doing anything regarding this? i really hope mountain lion fixes it when it's out.

It's been over a year since the initial post about this problem and it doesn't seem to have been resolved because I think I'm starting to see this occur a little more often by other people sending out meeting cancellations for events I know they are not the originator). Perhaps this is becoming more common as people are bringing their macs (or iPads?) into the work place. So I don't think it's been fixed. I just wanted to post and see if anyone still experiences this bug? Does it occur it Mountain Lion too? Does it occur with iOS?

One thing I learned in the midst of my fiasco with this bug, which was so troubling that I have not touched iCal since, is the particular meeting invite that caused the problem was generated in a secure manner (sent by my companie's HR dept). Our IT director told me they investigated and came to the conclusion it is iCal/exchange bug, but not readily fixable by them (ie by changing server configurations). I should also add, I had used iCal with exchange at work for several months without a problem. But this one email sent from the company HR to about 1000 people resulted in me sending out a cancellation event to every recipient on the original invite when I accepted it. The problem in this instance was this particular meeting went into my personal calendar (NOT my exchange calendar) and THAT triggered the sending of ~ 1000 email cancellations. And since it wasn't being added to the right calendar, I did this several times trying to add it to my exhchange calendar before realizing what was happening each time I did that.

This bug caused so much confusion and agony for so many people and admins who manage other peoples calendars that I have had to move off iCal - repeating the offense would be inexcusable. And our IT dept was very perplexed (initially) and annoyed (later) because they couldn't retract the 1000s of meeting cancellatioins I (apparently) sent out nor could they prevent this from happening again.

I went out and bought Parallels, Win7, and Office inorder to be compatible with everyone at work. I have to say the solution works very well - Windows has never been so stable as it is running virtually - but it was costly and on my own dime. This bug is like a tsunami - it occurs rarely, but when it does and you're the culprit, you can't get far enough away from it fast enough. Its terrible for eveyone!

I don't who's responsible for the bug but I wish it were fixed. And I wish I didn't have to spend another $600 to use this new Apple laptop in a work setting. Good grief!

I found this thread while searching for a fix to this very annoying problem. Axelfoo, I am also a business user (I work in IT) and recently had a Macbook Air 13" purchased by the company as my main laptop. We have an Exchange server here but I love using iCloud so much that I want to use it as much as possible even in the work place. Anyway...on to my experience with this problem (and spoiler...it's not fixed...sorry):

At first it was just a minor annoyance, but it's turned into a big problem for me. Basicaly any type of invitation sent to me whether it's an Exchange/Outlook invitation from another business user or a Google calendar invite (I'm using Mail and Calendar), if I try to move it to a different calendar it will send a cancellation email. At first I thought I would be able to completely remove Exchange from the equation when I got my Macbook seeing as that iCloud can do just about the same stuff. My goal was to create iCloud calendars, and then when someone sent me calendar invites from wherever...I would just accept them into my iCloud "work" calendar and be done with it. Well that was a big fail because whenver I get an Exchange calendar invite, I can accept in Mail, but it never appears in my Calendar. It just disappears...gone. Turns out that Exchange calendar invites are only being applied to my Exchange account, and thus not appearing in iCloud at all. So I just moved it to my iCloud calendar, and yep...I had several people asking me why I cancelled the event. ARGH!

I've added my Exchange account back to Calendar, and I'm now about to see invitations show up in Calendar, but if I change them to another iCloud calendar it sends out cancellations. Again, this was a minor annoyance that I could live with...until today. My wife sent me a Google calendar invite, and instead of going to my Exchange calendar which is set to the "default" in Preferences, it sent it to a shared calendar I have with my mom! So I have to change it, but now it will send a cancellation email out to my wife...great.

If there was simply a way to turn off cancellation notifcation or something, even that would suffice. Until that happens though, I guess I'm forced to use Outlook (I too have Parallels + Win 7). *sigh* Anyway, I wanted to share my experience and I will be watching this thread so that hopefully someone will come up with a resolution.

**update**

I know I just posted all that crap above, but I just got off the phone with Apple support and I've learned a little more about this problem. it's kind of a "oh, duh" moment for me, but well...there you go. So I have the following set up in Calendar:

1. Exchange calendar tied to myname@company.com (work)

2. 3 iCloud calendars set up tied to my Apple ID/iCloud account (home)

I use Mail, and it is setup like this:

1. Exchange email account tied to myname@company.com (work)

2. Apple ID/iCloud account (home)

After a little troubleshooting with Apple, basically it comes down to this: Exchange does not have any integration with iCloud whatsoever obviously, so when someone sends a calendar invite to my Exchange account (myname@company.com)...the ONLY calendar I can apply it to is my Exchange calendar. If I look at the event, in either Mail or Calendar, accept it, and then change it to iCloud...it's going to send out emails to the other invitees because it's switching between servers essentially. This also is the reason why when I accepted an Exchange calendar invite in Mail, but didn't see it in Calendar....because I didn't have Exchange enabled in Calendar and there is no way for the event to cross over to iCloud.

The Apple rep told me that as long as the calendar event stays within the original email address eco system, there won't be any declines on changes. So if my wife sends me one to my iCloud Home calendar, and I want to change it to Vacation in iCloud, that's fine, and she won't get a decline. If she sends to my Exchange email address and I move it to iCloud Vacation, then she will get a decline email because I moved servers.

Moral of the story is this: you can't use iCloud with your Exchange email. You have to keep the two separate until Apple comes out with some kind of plug-in that can be installed on the Exchange server to make it play nice...which I don't see happening :-).

@Franc_Iphone the problem you and I are experiencing is one and the same. You are moving an Exchange calendar event off of the server to another calendar (Google, Hotmail, Yahoo, iCloud, Joe'sCalendarSite)...it doesn't matter what you use. If put in my Yahoo account into Calendar and tried to move an event sent to my Exchange email address, it would do the exact same thing. Exchange sees that the event is no longer on it's server, and thus deletes it (sends decline email).

Unfortunately, this is simply a case where Exchange is operating by design, and there is no plug-in or whatever to allow Exchange to treat third party calendars as the same thing as it's own.

I was told by Apple suport that the "default calendar" setting in Calendar>Preferences is only for CREATING calendar events yourself. If you set that to your Exchange for the default, when you click the + to do a new event, it will defautl to your Exchange calendar. I was under the impression that the default calendar setting would mean that any appointments that came in would default to whatever I had set...according to Apple support (and I talked to a "senior level support engineer" after being escalated)...this is by design.

Anyway, if the above is correct and "by design" as Apple support stated, then I think you may have hit on the actual bug which is that calendar invites don't always hit the correct calendar the first time. Are you saying that your customer sends you an invite to your Exchange email address, and it goes to your iCloud or Google calendar instead? Can you duplicate that error? I'm not saying you are wrong, it may very well be a bug and it's just messed up. Just trying to help!

Yep, that sounds very familiar, unfortunately. Sigh....

This is rapidly becoming a deal breaker. I used to actually use my iPhone as a useful device at work. It was phone nirvana having all my contacts convieniently integrated in one place, email, IM, phone (personal and work in one place!). Everything I hated about the Outlook calendar and contacts was gone. However, now since I cannot decline meeting invites from the iPhone, it is now a seriously handicapped device. This is not a viable situation. It's ridiculous to think I'll have to go to Android or Bberry to avoid this problem. What the fark is going on!

I'll live like this for a few more months but if some work around isn't implemented I'm regretfully switching to a phone that plays nice with Exchange. This stinks!

Maybe the silver lining could be I'll discover Android is actually pretty good?

It's curious, I had been using my iPhone with exchange for several months without encountering this bug. Now it happens all the time and is creating a lot of mayhem at work. I'm worried IT may adopt a policy to disallow iPhones for all the havoc being wreaked.

Your post is intriguing b/c I've noticed connectivity issues betwen iOS and Exchange. I think you're right that if the "connection" is not established right away, then the exchange calendar is not available and thus the invite defaults to a non-exchange calendar, triggering a fiasco.

This is horrible and Apple really needs to fix this issue!! I was a recipient of a meeting notice from the Medical Director for a large metropolitan area EMS system. I noticed the event was tied to my personal (@mac) email address and reassigned it to my work (Exchange) address - then the whoosh sounds started flying - one after the other after the other! It was horrible!! There were 20 people on this original invitation. Not only did iCal send out cancellation notices to them all, it also sent out a NEW calendar invitation in from my Exchange account!! And further, it excluded the originator of the initial event!

I quickly sent all of the recipients an apologetic email asking them to disregard the cancellation notice. If they don't click on the link in the cancellation email, the original meeting notice will hold.

I understand the logic about switching between servers - but still. Not something an end-user should have to deal with.

Apple - please fix!!!!!

Sun and Soul - Apple - please fix!!!!!

Apple don't read these boards and no one at Apple will be worrying about this. There's an Apple bug/feature requests area rsomwhere (GIYF) which they do read - although it's no gurarantee that they'll do anything about it - especially if Apple believes they have applied the spec. correctly.

we have one user who has exactly the same issue. the cancellation of events was sent from her to all attendees.

wanted to know if this has been fix in mavericks? wanted to confirm before I update one of my user's laptop to mavericks

for those that has this issue, please do report back if you still experiencing this issue on mavericks

phil