Invited events disappear from iCal

I have the same issue with iCal and invites coming into Mail. It appears that if the invite is an attachment to the email, I can open this and it creates an event in iCal and the original email is left alone. However, if the invite comes at the top of the email showing the times and boxes to click for Maybe, Accept and Decline; and I click on Accept the email dissappears for a minute then the email goes in my Trash. The event is not logged in iCal. I tried to turn off time zone support(which I like to use for my international travel), but this did not help. Hmm, did not have this issue in Leopard. On a new MBP with Lion loaded from the factory. Cheers, CT

exactly the same, but seems to have developed recently. i'm trying to deconstruct what i changed to trigger this bug. thanks everyone for posting, i feel less alone!

Ditto. I received a Google Cal invite via Mail. The email had a Invite Summary Box in in the email with When, Where, and Who. At the bottom of email was the .ics invite. When I double clicked on the .ics file, iCal would open, show the event for 1-2 seconds and disappear without a warning or randomly the event would reappear but accepting cased a server error. Yet, when I moved my coursor over the When in the Invite Summary Box, a highligt box appeared with a down arrow. When I clicked on the down arrow, an iCal pop floating window appeared in Mail, and I was able to add the event without issue. I was able to edit the event, plus the event synced on my iCloud devices. One con to this 'work around', event information was missing, such as the invitees and the URL linking the .ics back to Google. Hope this 'work around' helps others.

cwsiii

Holy **** ATXIII, thanks a lot for discovering and sharing this! Works for me too and just makes me that much happier...

Yes, google-calendar invitations sent to gmail-address, opened in Mail, whether by opening one of the .ics Attachements (I get 2 attachments in each invite)

1) Show up in iCal for ~3 seconds while the "Updating..." message shows up at the top of iCal

2) and then immediately disappear without a trace.

Setup

15" Macbook Pro, 10.7.4

iCal 5.0.3 with only 1 account, Google Calendar with CalDAV setup in order to make the different colors of my google calendars sync with nearly identical colors on iCal.

Apple Mail 5.2

Multiple Google Calendars, invitations sent only to the "primary" calendar - the default associated with 1 gmail address

Solutions that partially work:

1) as proposed by ATXIII above - using the QuickLook Apple "recognition" abilities - when you hover over the date - it recognizes it as a date and the QuickLook down arrow appears - clicking on that creates a calendar event on the said date and time

- THE PROBLEM: this doesn't actually recognize this as an invite - sooo, it will only create the invite in the default calendar (if the invite came to a different email address associated with a different calendar, you'd have to manually change that). Also, it doesn't recognize this as an invitation...so it doesn't show the list of invitees.

2) a similar solution - Mail will recognize the "Maybe" and "More Options" hyperlinks as web hyperlinks and you can get a QuickLook view of the webpage by hitting the downarrow. This is a mini-less-than-perfect view of the google calendar invitation webpage where you can click Yes, No, Maybe

-THE PROBLEM requires you to be online -- also is not a seemless Mail-iCal solution -- is actually using web google calendar, so you'll have to refresh iCal to sync from google calendar down to iCal

3) the solution proposed by adavison above --- turning off time zone support and having google calendar autoaccept invites

THE PROBLEM - the main problem for me is I don't want to autoaccept invitations - I want to be able to decline or say maybe -- it's unnerving to have my calendar buzz me a reminder for events I never really planned for

--also again this is not a Mail-iCal solution --- it's using google calendar as the mediary - again the online/offline issue, though less notable since

WHAT I WANT: an explanation as to why opening a .ics file doesn't just create an event in iCal without that event disappearing seconds later?

Here is a 4th less-than-optimal solution:

Open the attachment in the email in ical and accept the invite. Immediately click on the new event and cmd+c. As soon as the event disappears, use cmd+c to put it back.

Seems to work, though in some cases I got a message saying I was about to invite people to my new event. In that case I click "edit" and remove the attendees. Weirder is that sometime when this happens I do not see a "save" button so I have to cmd+w to close the window. Seems to work...

That said, why has there been no response from Apple in this issue?

This is happening with me, too. I receive invites from someone using Outlook for Mac. I click on the invite, sometimes I can "Accept", sometimes my only choice is "OK". The appointment shows up in iCal. Sometimes it sticks, sometimes it disappears 10-15 seconds later.

Apple?!?!

I posted this somewhere else in relation to iCal issues, but it's worth saying here as well. If you just bought a Mac or Mountain Lion 10.8, then I'd recommend taking advantage of the included 3 months of free Apple support (longer if you got AppleCare).

Here's the English number for Canada: 1-800-263-3394

Post your results back to the thread please!

Found a couple of solutions, albeit cluggy (both require you to turn off Automatically Retrieve CalDAV invitations from mail, in the Advanced preferences) -

1. When you recieve an email with an ics file, right click on it instead of double-clicking. Then select "Add to Calendar". This will put the appointment on your calendar, but not accept it for you. Then you can go into the calendar and accept or decline it, if you like.
2. Drag and drop the ins file on to your calendar

In both cases, you need to select the correct calendar you want to add the appointment to. In my case, the appointment is added to my iCloud account by default and I just re-assign it to the Google Apps calendar.

I seem to be having the same / a closely related problem. I'm using Google Calendar as my primary calendar and subscribe to it via iCal.

Added .ics files disappear after a split second. The copy-paste method mentioned above keeps them there (if I can grab it in time).

An easy workaround is to "Go Offline" from the Calendar menu and then add the event. It doesn't disappear. I then copy and paste it before choosing "Go Online". Both events remain. I delete one of the two and the other stays on my calendar. This does not require changing any settings in the iCal preferences.

Perhaps the information that it is only when the calendar is 'Online' that the problem of the event disappearing helps someone diagnose what the root of the problem is. It's also useful to note that the copied event doesn't disappear, and that neither event disappears if the event was added while the calendar was 'offline'.

unbelieveable that there are this many people having this many problems and they still haven't fixed it. never had that problem on 10.5. amazing how they could take a very simple thing that was working and mess it up. and then charge money for it.

Agreed. For some reason some apps have become less stable and more complicated, iCal being one of them.

"THE PROBLEM - the main problem for me is I don't want to autoaccept invitations - I want to be able to decline or say maybe -- it's unnerving to have my calendar buzz me a reminder for events I never really planned for"

I have been unable to load any .ics files for meetings I am actually going to -- but this morning I was greeted with an event that had been automatically added to my iCal from SPAM! I had a spam in my inbox with .ics that got loaded into my iCal without a whimper. This is getting horrible.

OSX 10.7.5, iCal 5.0.3

Same problem here. 2 combo's that have the problem; an Exchange server with 10.8.4 client, an MacOS X 10.7 Server (server) with 10.7 client. Maybe that helps to narrow down the source of the problem.

I have this same problem on 10.8 and google apps.

No one seems to have an answer. Any updates from apple?