Sending a calendar item to Outlook as a .ics file

sftriman has asked for the wisdom of the Perl Monks concerning the following question:

I am trying send a calendar item via email to an Outlook user. The goal is that the user receives the email and it automatically asks them to ACCEPT / DECLINE the calendar item. I am using MIME::Lite and and sending a .ics file as an attachment to the email. Here is an example of the text sent: BEGIN:VCALENDAR METHOD:PUBLISH PRODID:-//Microsoft Corporation//Outlook 10.0 MIMEDIR//EN VERSION:2.0 BEGIN:VEVENT CLASS:PUBLIC DESCRIPTION:Appointment tomorrow DTSTAMP:20090327T102202Z DTSTART:20090328T200002Z DTEND:20090328T203002Z LOCATION:USOC Scheduling System PRIORITY:5 SEQUENCE:0 SUMMARY:Appt TRANSP:OPAQUE UID:someone.nice END:VEVENT END:VCALENDAR The mime type for this attachment is text/calendar and is, as I said before, attached as a .ics file. In Outlook 2002, when I receive the email, I can click on the attachment to open it in the calendar. But on a Blackberry, this isn't possible to do in Outlook 2003, so I am told. I want it to prompt with ACCEPT / DECLINE. Does anyone know how to make this magic happen? Thanks! David

Comment on Sending a calendar item to Outlook as a .ics file

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Re: Sending a calendar item to Outlook as a .ics file by Quicksilver (Scribe) on Mar 31, 2009 at 10:26 UTC
You need to force the MIME headers to get Outlook 2003 and 2007 to show the accept/decline buttons (sorry, never dealt with anything previous to that) as they have patchy support for iCal. This href="http://www.mavetju.org/programming/outlook-ics.php" page provides a useful starter point and discussion of headers. You'll also might want to keep in mind the fact that Outlook has its own special way of representing timezones using vtimezone if you start using those as well. The ical4j package has a directory containing them if you need these.	[reply]
Re: Sending a calendar item to Outlook as a .ics file by Anonymous Monk on Mar 31, 2009 at 06:51 UTC
Whomever told you that lied	[reply]