How can i delete notifications from iCal without sending the decline/deleted notification to the sender?

This could have changed from my version of OS X to Snow Leopard, but iCal Help says this:

• To delete a calendar or calendar group from the Calendars list on your computer, select the calendar or calendar grouping you want to delete, then press the Delete key.

If you're deleting a calendar that was published on .Mac, you have a choice of deleting the published copy of the calendar or letting it remain on the server. You'll no longer be able to make changes to the published copy; however, people who have subscribed to that calendar will still be able to view the last published version.

If you're deleting a calendar that includes an event with attendees, you can choose to notify the attendees that you are cancelling the event, or just delete the event without sending any notification.

Deleting a calendar group deletes all the calendars contained in the group.

• To delete a previously published calendar from the .Mac server (so people who have subscribed to it can no longer see it in their Calendars list), choose Go > iDisk in the Finder, then choose Go > Go to Folder. Type "/Volumes/membername/Sites/.calendars/," where "membername" is your .Mac account name. Drag the deleted calendar that you no longer want published to the Trash.

This is indeed for the old version.

In Lion, ... "if you delete a calendar that includes an event with invitees, iCal will notify them that the event has been canceled.".

There does not seem to be any way to prevent the notifications. Now I happen to have an old work-related calendar with hundreds of entries (and thus also hundreds of invitees).

How do I prevent spamming a few hundred colleagues with 'Declined' notification e-mails from past meetings?

There must be a way to do this I would think?

Admins or Apple Support, please address issue this *directly*. There *needs* to be an option to screen or disable the email replies that are sent out when any action is taken on an Exchange invite in iCal.

Consider the case where multiple computers running iCal+Mail.app are synced to the same Exchange account.

Example: iMac at home and MacBook Pro on the road, both run Lion, both are configured with Exchange calendars. I get an invite from someone and accept it on the iMac. Then when I go on the road with MBP, and open iCal on it, that invite is still in the iCal "inbox". I've already replied to it on the iMac, but it's still there on the MBP. I want to remove it, but not without sending out *another* response when I do.

The net effect of this problem is either that colleagues will get flooded with multiple declines/accepts, or the little red badge on the iCal app icon (and in the inbox drawer) will keep incrementing in perpetuity. The former is quite unprofessional and the latter is anathema to Apple's philosophy of a clean, simple, and effecient user experience.

I've just encountered a situation where the ability to delete an unwanted invite (without reply) is a must.

Four identical messages just came in to my iCloud account, allegedly from DHL Shipping, but they're not -- it's a phishing scam. These contained .ics invitations. I absolutely DO NOT want give those B*st*rds any indication this is a valid mail address, because then they'll send me more spam. But I can't delete them without notification.

I tried taking all my accounts offline in Mail and deleting one invite, but it did it regardless.

Besides, there's a basic philosophy that's being violated here: My calendar is MY business, MY time to manage. No one--ESPECIALLY a stranger--has any inherent right to know that their meeting request has been accepted, declined, or even noticed.

It's none of their business.

Apple needs to fix this.

Solution:

I have the same problem...I received several phishing messages that contained ical events. I couldn't delete them without iCal wanting to notify the sender, which of course I didn't want to do.

I disconnected my computer from the internet (including turning off wi-fi). I deleted the calendar event, and a notification email was generated and put in my outbox. In the mail program, I deleted the message from the outbox. Then I reconnected the computer to the internet.

A little clumsy, but I think it did the job of preventing the notification from being sent.

Thanks for the solution, John. It worked for me, but sadly demonstrates Apple's apparent current inability to think systemically about the way their products interact with the wider base of (sometimes negative) internet users.

An increasing amount of the spam email I receive is includind this .ics exploit to manipulate an email response from the user. The fact that Apple actively prevents its users from easily not confirming the validity of their email address to the spammers verges on the downright negligent.

Honestly, I know Apple does not view these forums, but depressingly often these days I am coming up against the impact of cretinous decisions by this once eminent company that make me want to just slap Tim Cook in the face, shouting "WAKE UP!!"

Have to agree here. This is completely unacceptable. Apple needs to fix this. It is a complete security risk as I now have a plethora of invitations in my calendar from people I don't even know and when I try to delete them I get the "well, I'm going to tell them..." warning.

Same here, and same request to Apple. Fix this, ASAP. Going offline is not an option everywhere, at every time. This is an exploit and it needs to be addressed.

I had this same problem in deleting .ics invites received in Spam email. Apple mail automatically added the event to my calendar. Going off line and deleting the message did not work for me, on Mac OS v.10.8. No email appeared in my drafts folder so there was nothing I could delete. Going back online made the email appear only after it was automatically sent.

😟

Unfortunately, this has been a problem for years and is the #1 complaint I get about Calendar. As Mattelfesso states the problem has gotten worse with Calendar 6.0, as the response message doesn't appear in a Mail outbox, so you can't delete it prior to going on-line. Is the iCal data base documented anywhere, so an app could be written to remove designated meetings without to automatic response being generated? Outlook seems to handle supression of notifications, so I'm guessing this isn't an Exchange problem that OSX Calendar can't.

http://www.nhoj.co.uk/icalreplychecker used to provide a solution for this for iCal, which worked great for me,

and does claim to work with Calendar.app, though I have not tried this.

This really is an issue.

Really astounding how in general apple mac apps are just ok when they could be great!

Just had an encounter with this problem today as well. Calendar app decided to send an reply to a business meeting invitation from my (very secretly kept) private adress instead of my company mail adress to which the invitation was sent. This is very annoying at least. Actually, I would rather consider this a major security issue than a simple software bug!

I had hoped that all the problems with iCal invitations would be resolved after upgrading from Mac OS X 10.6 to 10.8, but there's no progress at all. Interestingly enough, Calendar works quite good on iOS. So it's clear that Apple engineers know how to do it properly and that the Mac OS X implementation is broken.

To me, Calendar on Mac OS X is very unprofessional and makes me look unprofessional to my business partners. This is a real PITA.

I have read about the ReplyChecker plug-in, which sounds great except:

For anyone who is trying to use Mac Mail with an MS Exchange account, this plug-in will not work, nor will disconnecting your internet and deleting Exchange-based invitations. Apparently Exchange-based responses are sent from the server (I've read) and not from your outbox, so they cannot be circumvented.

Apple has done a pretty good job integrating MS Exchange capabilities, but this is a fatal flaw, that I simply can't accept - I unfortunately must use MS Outlook on my mac because of this.

When is this blunder going to be reversed? I was shocked to discover that I couldn't delete an event without sending an email. At the moment I despearyely want to delete the event. If I have to take drastic action it won't be disconnecting the network it will be deleteing iCalendar.