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iCloud calendar doesn't send invitations to Gmail users...

To clarify on the above post title: iCloud calendar invites sometimes send calendar invites to Gmail users, but not always.


It appears that if the user's Gmail account is associated with an AppleID account, then that user will not receive an iCloud calendar event invitation email. I discovered this when I began looking into why my wife did not receive an invite at her Gmail account, which also happens to be her primary AppleID for iTunes/AppStore purchases.


I found that my own primary AppleID, also associated with a Gmail account, did not receive invites, either. However, a test Gmail account I have, that has never been associated with Apple/iTunes/iCloud/etc., receives invites just fine. Also, MS Exchange mailboxes receive the invites properly, as do Yahoo accounts.


Any ideas as to what the secret is here? I cannot believe Apple would decide to prevent invites being sent out to 3rd party addresses that happen to also be AppleIDs on their own system, as that'd be quite ludicrous.

Posted on Nov 1, 2011 5:22 AM

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Question marked as Top-ranking reply

Posted on Nov 1, 2011 8:04 AM

Okay, so I've found something:


Until now, there have been many, many Apple product users who've created AppleIDs associated with external email accounts, including Gmail. Now that iCloud has been released, many of them have turned on portions of iCloud or perhaps gone so far as to create iCloud email addresses/aliases under their primary AppleID.


Here's where it gets weird: there's a setting in iCloud calendar preferences turned on by default called "Use iCloud for incoming invitations". What this does is, if an invitation is sent to that primary AppleID (which is most often an external address) or its associated, newly-created iCloud address, it'll get routed to iCloud, preventing (blocking) the invite from being forwarded to that external address.


For example, a user's primary, pre-iCloud AppleID is john1234@gmail.com. iCloud is opened to the public, he enables it on an iDevice or Lion OS X and it asks if him to enter his AppleID credentials (john1234@gmail.com) and asks if he wants to create an iCloud address, which he does, john1234@me.com.


From now on, let's presume he's continuing to use his john1234@gmail.com account, because he's not really sure yet that he wants to make the switch to iCloud for email, etc. At this point, if another iCloud user sends him a calendar invite at his primary email, john1234@gmail.com, Apple has decided it'll route this invite directly to his john1234@me.com iCloud alias, never letting it send out to his Gmail account.


So, assuming he's not yet using iCloud email/alendar, he'll be clueless as to why he never received the invite OR, if he is using iCloud email/calendar alongside his primary Gmail account, he'll probably wonder how in the world an invite sent from a friend to his Gmail account is now showing up in his iCloud inbox/calendar.


Why Apple's enabled this by default is beyond me. At this point, it's preventing me from going to iCloud full-time because I can't be sure invitees will get my calendar events!

68 replies

Jan 7, 2012 9:58 AM in response to stteve

I've been in contact with a Senior Advicor from MobileMe for 2-3 weeks now, and they have escalated my issue several times and haven't been able to pinpoint what is causing it. The 2 things they had me do is make sure my AppleID had an @me.com address associated with it, and make sure that the login for my AppleID is not used as an alternate mailing address on any OTHER AppleIDs. Get a little bit frustrated that this has been going on for almost a month now and the engineers at Apple can't get their stuff together. Why do I sound mad? They deleted all of my reminders when I gave them access to my account for testing purposes.

Jan 17, 2012 6:43 AM in response to Untmdsprt

Hello,

I'm having the same problem. I tried many hints founds in the forums : changing gmail to googlemail, ticking/unticking various checkboxes, removing associated emails... nothing changes.

I can receive invites on my @me.com email only, not on the @gmail.com, which is the AppleID. And I can't send any invites.


Very frustrating !


If anybody had new ideas, I would be very happy !

Jan 17, 2012 9:41 AM in response to rochech

The case I had open with the Senior Advisor at MobileMe support has been resolved after almost a month. The issue that prevented me from sending/receiving calendar invitations was related to the email address that I use for my AppleID being associated as an alternate contact address for two other AppleIDs. The weird thing is that I couldn't see the association when I was logged in to the two other accounts. The addresses had to be manually removed from the system, and as soon as they were, my invitations started working as if nothing had ever happened. I strongly encourage anyone who is experiencing this issue to contact iCloud/MobileMe chat support and reference this discussion. You should be able to escalate your case to a Senior Advisor so that the issue can be efficiently resolved.

Jan 26, 2012 3:03 PM in response to Brian.Black

Andrey is absolutely correct. My wife and I were having the same problem, unable to send or receive invites using our @me.com accounts.

We had 4 different apple IDs, 2 @hotmail.com and 2 @me.com, so I googled "appleid" clicked on "My Apple ID" website, far right mid screen "Manage your account>", logged in using all of our Apple IDs one at a time and under "Name, ID, Email Addresses>" I deleted all additional emails and only left the "Apple ID and Primary Email Address" for each account. Fixed the problem, invites now work.

Jan 30, 2012 4:13 PM in response to Brian.Black

I read the first post and did some testing myself. In order to fully explain what I did, I'll have to tell you what I have:

I started using Apple when is was still .Mac, so I have an active @mac.com address. That was later "upgraded" with an @me.com alias (which I don't give out or use). I also have an info@"myowndomain".nl and a work-email (patrick@"work".nl)


Because I'm still using my MacBook Pro 1,1 (Core Duo), I wanted to test an additional iCloud account for my iPhone 4 without the risk of loosing access to my Address Book etc. And boy, am I glad I created that test-account!!!


So to sum it up so far:

MM@mac, MM@me, info@, work@ and iCloud@me (Are you all still with me??)


I created a new event on iCloud.com and invited my other four mail adresses. Only ONE invite made it to Mail.app, which was work@. Amazingly enough the event did show up in my iCal 5.0 calendar. Twice to be exact (one for MM and one for info@). I did get notifications from the app, but not in my e-mail... :-S


On iCloud.com I turned the "pref" for using iCloud only to recieve events off for my iCloud@ address. First I deleted the first invite. Same thing happend: 1 email notification to work@. But the event did disappear from iCal. Then I made a new invite on iCloud.com. Exactly the same as the first time and not very surprisingly: the exact same results... Also deleted that.


So I logged on to manage my MobileMe AppleID. It turned out that my MM@mac was set as my primairy address. And MM@me and info@ were both registered as additional addresses. So I deleted the last two, leaving only my MM@mac. And work@ was abscent from this list all together, btw.


Then I proceded once again to create a new invite from iCloud.com to my other 4 e-mail addresses. (Just like the other two times). Again I did get an invite in my work@ mailbox, but now also in my info@ account. YEEY. Still nothing on MobileMe, though...

But the event did show up in iCal again: once for info@ and once for MM.

Only one invite and iCal placing for MM makes sence, because @me.com it merely an alias, not a different mailbox ;-)


So.........

My conclusion is now that this is truely a problem on Apple's side, not Google or anyone else!

As soon as an email address is linked to an Apple ID, it will remain in the iCloud. If your Apple ID is still on MobileMe, then everything works just fine. (Yes, I did that reverse test as well.)

Also it seems that the .ics file is correctly pushed from caldav.icloud.com to cal.me.com, while the email sending it gets stuck with its head in the iCloud.


I suspect it will have something to do with that both MobileMe and iCloud are using the @me.com extention. And to be honest, as soon as I heard that new iCloud members would obtain @me.com addresses, I wondered if that wasn't going to lead to some serious trouble... Turns out: YEP.


Apart from that, I do believe that Apple should thurn that "pref" off by default!!

I think there are so many people that created an Apple ID just to have access to the iPhone App Store and linked that to their third party email account, but do not use their @me.com mail address nor ever log on to iCloud.com. And for Apple to make all those people log on just to click off one checkbox??? I don't think so. Do you??


Well, anyway, I hope this helps. Any questions? I'll be happy to do some more testing :-)

Feb 2, 2012 7:40 AM in response to rochech

Hello,


Following my previous post, I contacted the online mobileme Support. After some basic tests I asked the issue to be escalated and I was then put in contact with a higher level technician. I stayed in contact with this man during two weeks as he re-escalated the file to engineering department.

The problem has just been solved, the solution after all is the one stated previously : they removed my gmail email from other Apple IDs I had. I don't know why, but I coundn't do it myself via the AppleID interface as my concerned email wasn't shown.


So once again if you encounter the same thing and after having passed the various basic checks they have to perform, you should mention this topic to the Engineering department 😉

Feb 6, 2012 12:41 AM in response to Andrey

YES! Contacting apple support also solved my problem. I Also couldn't remove (or see) that my appleID was registered with an old MobileMe account that was no longer active (Was a 30 day free trial that I didn't continue). I think at one point in december they rolled all MobileMe accounts over to iCloud somewhere in December (as it stopped working for me in December) and my email address conflicted on both accounts...


Support escalated the case and the address was manually removed by an employee and it started working like before.

Aug 20, 2012 12:16 PM in response to Brian.Black

Thanks to all for their information. I spent a few hours on this last night and this is how I fixed my particular issue. To baseline, here is our setup: one iPhone 4 operating the latest official release and one New iPad (3rd generation whatever you call it) updated as well.


My wife uses my Apple ID to get apps on her iPad and we added her gmail address to my profile so she could receive facetime calls and stuff on her device. My primary email and Apple ID is also a gmail address. To summarize when I look at my profile under Apple ID, I have three emails - my primary gmail, her gmail, and my newly created .me address (see below for the .me explanation)


What I did not realize and ultimately what fixed our problem was that when setting up the phone, or even by enabling the cloud on my device, a ".me" address was not automatically created. Thus and very similar to folks on this and other threads, no matter how many times I added her to the invite list when making new entries, it would send nothing and when I went back to the event (close and re-open calendar), her name was gone. It suddenly made sense that because both of our email was on my Apple ID it would not work.


Our fix happened after I completed setup of my ".me" iCould address. I know this sounds like an amazingly simple fix but it worked for us. I would say for all users having problems make sure you have a .me address set up through iCloud. It was free and took about a minute to configure.


One downside that I noticed is that I have to now keep my iCloud email enabled on my phone or it will not send out new invites. Even though it is setup and configured (and gmail is still my primary), if I don't have it enabled under settings>mail, etc it will not send.


The end result of this is that I can now send invites to her at her gmail address from my device even though both of our email addresses are listed under my Apple ID. I don't plan on giving out my ".me" address and I plan on putting an auto-forward on .me to send everything to my gmail. Hopefully that won't mess it up but for now it works great.


Hope this helps someone. It was very frustrating and I feel the pain! Good luck..


Luke

Aug 23, 2012 8:34 AM in response to djlucas

This is all so confusing. All I want to do is send meeting requests from my iPhone 4 (5.0.1) or MBP (10.7.4 -

MacBookPro8,2) (with or without *.ics attachments as required) from a specific email address to any email address. All this from my @work email address.


Currently I have linked iCal to iCloud – on the iPhone and MBP. When I create an iCal (MBP) event with invitees, they receive the request, but it's from noreply@me. How does one use their personal or work email address? This creates a whole new issue of recipient's servers sending the message to junk mail or 'Oh I was looking for your office email. What's @me.com? Should I use this email address from now on?'


Since the invitation is from me.com, how does the recipient reply via email with a question about the meeting request, keeping the same email thread?


If this meeting is cancelled an additional email is received. The recipients can respond to the meeting organizer through iCloud. (The cancellation uses the organizer's email address as an alias I think, unlike the initial invitation.) But the meeting organizer's AppleID email address is the reply to address.

On my MBP I have the Me/My Card set up as my @work email address.


Are all invitations sent through/from the Apple iCloud server using noreply@me.com?

Sep 24, 2012 11:25 AM in response to zmtiger

It appears that all invites go out as noreply@me.com. IMO - this just another example of an incomplete solution from Apple. I love much of what Apple does - but often they seem to not take into account even the simplest of features available in other products. No group/distribution lists supported in IOS interface would be another example.


It is rather bafferling to me why Apple would chose to remove the email address of the owner of an event. It just seems unfinished.


--

-Mark

Sep 24, 2012 1:18 PM in response to aklick

aklick wrote:


There is a solution listed right in the thread. Here it is: Very quick and simple.


In short go to https://www.icloud.com/

sign in using your apple ID information

Click on Calendar

Click on the settings button in the upper right hand corner (looks like a cog)

Click on preferences

Click on advanced

Uncheck "use icloud for incoming inviations"


THANK YOU!!! 🙂

This fixed a problem I've had for months, since moving to iCloud!!!

Sep 27, 2012 2:24 AM in response to MacMarkT

With the io6 upgrade. Everything has changed my invite capability . I created a new apple Id for my wife's phone. Don't remember the old one. Does apple have a phone number to ask someone as I need help with all this. I tried clicking the

"Receive iCloud invitations as:


Email to xxxx@gmail.com


Just like the example you gave MacMark and it still doesn't work

iCloud calendar doesn't send invitations to Gmail users...

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