iCloud calendar invitations not working (sending or receiving)

Hey,

setup icloud calendar and contacts between icloud.com, mac, ios6 and I also cannot send out any calendar invitations.

Read a few post and changed the settings in calendar to my email address in the setting "Receive event invitations as" and that did not fix the issue also.

Basically icloud calendar and event invites do not work.

Multi Billion dollar company, great products and can't get the calendar to work correctly.... sigh

I was having a similar problem, but it went a little deeper. My wife could not receive calendar invites at her Gmail address because her Gmail address is also her iCloud login. My Gmail address is (was) also my iCloud login. I have it working now with a fairly simple workaround. Here are the steps I took:

-I changed my iCloud login to a different e-mail address (outlook.com) and that didn't solve it.

-I created an entirely new iCloud login, but she still could not receive invites

-I tried sending invites to other e-mail services, like Yahoo, and those worked fine

-I tried sending to her throwaway Gmail address and that worked fine

OK, so at this point it definitely appears to be related to the fact that her Gmail address was also her iCloud login. The way I saw it, there were three solutions. Either she had to change her iCloud login, or use a different e-mail for calendaring, or I had to stop using iCloud calendar.

I like iCloud despite its quirks so I didn't want to stop using it. While she might be willing to change her login because she loves me, that's not really practical because there are sure to be other people out there that have the same issue. Asking all of your friends, family, and colleagues to change their iCloud logins because you can't send them calendar invites is kind of crazy. Then I remembered that Gmail allows modifiers for e-mail addresses. You can put periods ( . ) anywhere in the address and/or a plus symbol ( + ) at the end plus a combination of characters.

-So if her e-mail was janedoe@gmail.com, and that was also her iCloud login, then I can send the calendar invite to jane.doe@gmail.com or janedoe+calendar@gmail.com or jane.d.o.e@gmail.com and she'll get the invite.

The trick there is that those other e-mails addresses are not, as far as Apple is concerned, her iCloud login, but they are, as far as Google is concerned, her e-mail address.

iCal event invites do not seem to work.

When you create a new event when I type in the names it should pull there email address from my Address Book, or iMail I am not sure which. They appear but when I select them they are greyed out in the invitteed drop down box with a ? next to them on the edit new event screen. Seems to be to non icloud user seems to work with my gmail account which is also the email i use for

my apple id

SOLUTION:

Turn on iCloud Calendar in Settings/iCloud/Calendar!

Not a solution because that is the 1st thing I did. 😐

Have used iCloud calendar sharing for over a year and am beginning to suspect something is not quite right. I have an iPad and an iPhone which both share the same Apple ID and share the same friends' calendars - the iPad calendar SHOULD be a mirror of the calendar on my iPhone. My partner has her own ID on her iPhone and a friend also has their own - we all share each others' calendars. Usually the theory seems fine - MY iPhone and iPad calendars work in parallel. The exception to the normal reliability seems to occur with INVITATIONS. I am beginning to suspect that if an invited party responds to an invite created on either my iPad or iPhone calendar - the response (and therefore updated event) will only seem to appear on whichever device received the pushed reply first. To simplify - two devices, same ID, same shared calendars - a reply from an invitee is presumably "pushed" via cloud - my iPhone happens to be switched on - the iPad not - so the iPhone calendar gets the update. iCloud "thinks" job done so does not push again when my second device is later switched on and syncs with iCloud. This ONLY seems to happen with invites. Is this a mad theory?

IF I switch off iCloud calendars on the device that is missing the odd shared invitation event - in other words delete all the content from the device and then pull it all down again from the cloud - the missing data usually appears as it should. I do NOT want to have to keep deleting all my shared calendar data and pulling it all down again - the sync process clearly is not propagating reliably.

Interesting little discovery... switching the iPad to airplane mode and back off (essentially disconnecting it from internet and switching back on) seems to have forced a "proper" refresh of the calendar and now reflects properly the iCloud calendar entries. Perhaps the method traditionally used on iOS7 - pressing the calendars button and pulling down the shared calendars list to "refresh" does not do a thorough enough job of it? Let's be honest here - there are already examples of "functionless" function buttons in both iOS6 and iOS7 calendar eg the "shared calendar alerts" button - someone PROVE me wrong but I am certainly convinced that this does NOT work - eg you will ALWAYS receive alerts to new calendar entries from shared calendars whatever setting it is on. You cannot stop them. So the more important invitations tend to get lost amongst a plethora of "new entry" alerts.