Frequently Asked Questions

Scheduling over Email (iMIP)

Q: How do I configure Calendar Server to send email invitations?

Calendar Server can send invitations to “external” users (i.e., those without an account on the server) via email, using the iCalendar Message-Based Interoperability Protocol (iMIP - ​http://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc2447 ). If you create an event and add an attendee which has an email address but does not have a local account, the server will generate an email message with a icalendar attachment containing the event details and a request for response. If the attendee uses an iMIP-compatible client to respond to the invitation, the server will parse the reply and update the organizer’s copy of the event accordingly.

What is required to set up iMIP:

  • An SMTP server
  • An IMAP or POP server
  • An email account dedicated to the calendar server – it is important that you not use your own email account for this because the server will delete any messages that appear in this account

Steps:

  1. Create an IMAP or POP account on your mail server solely for use by the calendar server (used to send a receive email)
  2. Edit caldavd.plist:
    • iMIP
    • Enabled = true
    • Sending
      • Server = your SMTP server name
      • Port = the port your SMTP server is listening on
      • UseSSL = true/false depending on whether your SMTP server is using SSL
      • Username = username to log in to SMTP (leave empty if no authentication is required by your SMTP server)
      • Password = password to log in to SMTP (leave empty if no authentication is required by your SMTP server)
      • Address = used as the From: address
    • Receiving
      • Server = your inbound (IMAP/POP) server name
      • Port = the port your IMAP/POP server is listening on
      • Type = either pop or imap
      • UseSSL = true/false depending on whether your IMAP/POP server is using SSL
      • Username = username to log in to IMAP/POP (do not use your own email account for this or your inbox will be wiped out)
      • Password = password to log in to IMAP/POP
      • PollingSeconds = how often to poll for incoming replies
    • AddressPatterns = an array of regular expressions defining which email addresses to send iMIP messages to – if an external attendee’s email address does not match these patterns, no invitation will be sent to them.
  3. Restart calendar server

Troubleshooting iMIP

Mail gateway didn’t find a token in message – Calendar Server uses “plus addressing” to encode a token into the reply-to address for email invitations. That way, when a reply comes back, the token can be used to look up the appropriate organizer, attendee, and event to update. This special tokenized email address is not only in the reply-to field, but also substituted for the organizer’s email address within the embedded icalendar body attached to the invitation. So iMIP-aware clients should direct the reply to the email address including the token. If that token is missing, the iMIP reply is not processed.

Configuring for LDAP

Q: How do I configure Calendar Server to use LDAP for users, groups, locations, and resources?

See LDAP directory service