w3c / calendar

W3C Calendar
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Outlook integration #47

Open chrisn opened 3 years ago

chrisn commented 3 years ago

When I receive an invitation from the calendar system, it comes as a formatted HTML email with an event.ics file as attachment containing the meeting details as markdown in plain-text.

This means I have to download the event.ics file to add it to my Outlook (on Windows) calendar to accept. Is it possible to be able to accept directly from the initial message, and not lose the formatting when added to the calendar?

jean-gui commented 3 years ago

I have tested with Outlook, and the steps required to add an event to the calendar are not as straight-forward as on other clients. You don't need to explicitly download the ics, but you have to click on the down arrow of the ics attachement and select "open" to create the event in outlook. There doesn't seem to be a better way to do it.

Regarding the fact that the event is imported as plain-text, that's how the ics specification is. Some clients such as Outlook do allow HTML using non-standardized properties, but most of them don't. And seeing how Outlook deals poorly with HTML emails, I'm not sure it's a good idea to use HTML in ics.

jean-gui commented 3 years ago

Some more info, it seems possible to add "accept" and "decline" buttons by crafting a very specific email. I'll try some things and see if I can make Outlook recognize those emails as events.