Mac Mail not showing .ics file for invitations sent via Outlook Calendar

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Level 1

4 points

Mac Mail not showing .ics file for invitations sent via Outlook Calendar

Hi,

I'm using Mac mail and regularly have people invite me meetings etc, and I use iCal as my calendar. If someone has sent me an invite from another iCal, I receive the email asking if I want to Accept / Decline etc and also I get the Mail Attachment, which I then click to download and it goes into iCal - great!

However, if someone invites me to something from Outlook I get the email, but only have a bar drop down to ask me to accept / decline. I don't get the .ics Mail Attachment in the email! Clicking accept / decline doesn't add to my calendar so there is no way for me to get the invite from mail into my iCal. I have to manually input it which isn't ideal.

The issue has only occurred after I switched to use Exchange for emails, but the Exchange accounts are disabled in calendar. As mentioned the issue only occurs Outlook -> Mac, not Mac -> Mac.

Thank you.

iMac, macOS High Sierra (10.13)

Posted on Apr 24, 2018 4:11 AM

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Answer 1

Top-ranking reply

djdawson

Level 2

179 points

Jun 7, 2018 9:53 AM in response to jnffc

I've been having the exact same problem, and up until now have been viewing the raw message text, extracting the "BASE64" part of the message with the calendar attachment, and manually decoding it in the Terminal to create the attached .ics file. However, I just did a search for these symptoms and found a post on StackExchange with a work-around, which is to simply drag the message with the calendar attachment to the Desktop and then open it there by double-clicking on it, which will display the attached file and allow you to work with it as usual.

I also checked my Exchange account settings and I did not have a Calendar Exchange account enabled, but I did so to see if that changed anything. After doing that I still don't see the invitation attachment in the Mail message, but I do see the tentative entry in the Calendar app directly where I can manage it as I would in Mail. I think I remember disabling the Calendar Exchange account a long time ago (several years) for some other reason (probably unreliable syncing or something similar), but perhaps Calendar works better with Exchange accounts now so I'm going to give it a try.

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