iCloud with personal email - Calendar Event Sharing

Calendar event sharing seems to be a pain for a lot of people especially because of the new iCloud and even more so if you are a legacy .Me or .Mac user.

First of all if you are a first time iCloud user and you entered your own personal e-mail address as your AppleID - you will not be able to send calendar events.

Calendar events (created from your computer (iCal or iPhone) to your spouse or whomever) have to be sent by Apple. If Apple does not have a .mac or .me account associated to your iCloud account it doesn't work. What happens is you can not invite anyone to events and when someone invites you, instead of the calendar event going into your calendar you get the invite as an e-mail message and you have to manually download the ical request.

BRAND NEW iCLOUD USER BUT CAN'T SEND CALENDAR EVENTS

So if you created an iCloud account from scratch with a personal e-mail address, you must go to your system prefs > iCloud, turn on "Mail & Notes" (even if you are not using iCloud e-mailand are using your own) THEN iCloud will ask you to create a new .me email address! You have to come up with a new email address and it will be associated with your AppleID. Then you can turn off the Mail & Notes option and now the calendar can send and accept calendar invites.

.ME OR .MAC USER MIGRATION BUT CAN'T SEND CALENDAR EVENTS

When I migrated from my .me account to iCould everything moved fine. But I soon came to realize that I no longer needed my .me account anymore. I had a different AppleID than my .me so I figured, now is a good time to stop using my myemail@me.com account and switch to my personal AppleID 'email@email.com' address. When I deleted my old iCloud account from my computer and added a new one (with my old original appleID) i was then unable to send calendar events. I realized that Apple has no way to send on my behalf. I have no email accout with apple. That is just because your AppleID is an email address doen not mean that Apple can use it to send and recieve email. * Your AppleID being your persoanl email address does not mean you have created an email account with apple, it means that you have created a Login ID with apple * Much the same way that Amazon.com can ask you to login and you enter your personal email address to do so.. In both cases they are just using your email as your ID with their system. SO, if you create an iCloud account from an AppleID that is your primary email address this means that you will also need a email address with Apple's .me or .mac system to send on your behalf, calendar invites.