You’re invited: Outlook meeting plugin for Mail
John Maisey has written an apple-scripted plugin 
for Mail.app, You’re Invited, that makes working with Outlook users easier.
It is similar to another plugin, OMiC . However, the feature sets do not over-lap completely. There are some things that OMiC does that this one doesn’t, so You’re Invited has a few tricks of its own up its sleeve.
As John explains on his web site:
This Mail.app rule was designed to avoid:
- Text only invites appearing in Mail.
- Invites arriving in Mail not being automatically sent to iCal.
- Invitations arriving in iCal that create the ‘email address that isn’t on your “me” card in Address Book’ error.
- Having to remember obscure key combinations.
- Having to repeatedly drag/drop .ics files onto iCal.
A neat little interface adds a rule to your preferences which runs a script on incoming messages:
Invitations buried in your emails are whizzed over to iCal for processing.
Unfortunately it conflicts with something in the guts of MailTags, which means that I won’t be using it.
But if you are not using MailTags , you might (i) ask yourself, Why not? and (ii) find You’re Invited useful.
UPDATE: You can work around for the conflict by uninstalling MailTags, installing You’re Invited and activating it, and then installing MailTags again.
The current beta is freeware (expires 21 February) and available from John’s web site .
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January 25th, 2007 at 11:50 pm
“Unfortunately it conflicts with something in the guts of MailTags, which means that I won’t be using it.”
Well, hopefully he can address this, as this looks like an otherwise very useful utility for those of us who are saddled with having to co-exist with Exchange users.
Unfortunately, it doesn’t appear at this point that it will handle invitations that are downloaded directly from an Exchange server (ie, via Mail as an IMAP client), since these tend to use embedded HTTP URLs back to the Outlook Web Access server rather than attached ICS/VCS files.
January 26th, 2007 at 12:16 am
I experienced this problem when I received what appeared to be text-only Outlook calendar appointments from my correspondents. Actually, Mail has a built-in tool to deal with with these on its own:
Select the View>Message>Previous Alternative menu command in Mail - the text turns into an attachment named “meeting.ics” (your mileage may vary. Double-click on the attachment and away it goes into iCal. Even easier is to use the keyboard shortcut - Command-[
There are, from time to time issues where the time zone for the meeting is munged because either iCal doesn’t parse the Outlook/Exchange formatted .ics file correctly, or the data in the file is mal-formed. Garbage in, garbage out.
I think Mail might do a better job of dealing with Outlook-spawned .ics files. There is no way to know, just looking at the mail, that it bears an iCal-compatible payload. It certainly doesn’t show up in the iCal Notifications pane as iCal-generated .ics attachments do.
January 26th, 2007 at 8:25 am
I’ve got an AppleScript that I run from the AS menu. The tip for it was originally at MacOSXHints.
http://www.macosxhints.com/article.php?story=20060821073102694
I modified it to run from the menu. It works great and is free.
January 26th, 2007 at 11:38 am
Thanks for the tip, Andy. I didn’t know about that.