John Maisley has updated his YAI (You Are Invited!) plugin for Leopard.

YAI converts invitations from MS Exchange, Google Calendar and Zimbra users into something that iCal can better understand.

It fixes annoying problems with shifting time zones, messages saying “you are not invited” and other blips that making working in a mixed-platform so annoying.

The utility comes packaged as an installer which unpacks its files into a folder in the Scripts folder in your user directory. When it’s installed, invitations are transferred straight into iCal as if they were created in iCal itself.

Further options in the installer allow you to set the background colour of a processed email invitation, mark it as flagged or not or to move it to another folder:

The updated version is not only available to Leopard users, it also improves the modification and deletion of duplicates, fixes a quirk in the way invites from some time zones without daylight saving are handled and improves the app’s option for subsequently moving the invitation to another folder.

YAI is similar to another plugin, OMiC , although the feature sets of the two plugins do not overlap completely. OMiC does more, and costs more (USD 29.95). For the extra money you get the ability to browse the inscrutable winmail.dat file in which attachments from Outlook users are sometimes packaged and more.

YAI is shareware (£3 per computer — c. USD 5.85) and has a fourteen day free trial period. You can get it from John’s web site .applescript, ical, mail.app, apple mail, invites, meetings, invitations, productivity, outlook, windows, zimbra, ms exchange

Tags: Apple Mail, applescript, iCal, invitations, invites, mail.app, meetings, ms exchange, outlook, Productivity, windows, Zimbra

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 .mail.app, apple mail, plugins, outlook, ical, invitations, invites, applescript, mailtags

Tags: Apple Mail, applescript, iCal, invitations, invites, mail.app, mailtags, outlook, plugins