Help Calendar .vcs .ics problem

[Stuart Leetham]

Hi all,

I am new here and i appologise if this has been covered already.

I have a Samsung Galaxy S5 and my partner has a Note 5. If we both get a calendar invitation from here work, sent from outlook 2003 my gmail receives the invite as a .ics file approx 1KB in size. I can view and accept the invite and it appears in my calendar.

My partner, on her Note 5, receives it as a .vcs, 0kb size, and cannot view or open the file.

If I forward the invite email from my phone to hers she gets the .ics file and can then accept the appointment into her calendar.

I am at a loss as to what is going on here.

 

[girolez]

Hi

Assuming you wife is also using gmail, has she ticked the "download attachments" box in gmail's settings? Maybe there is a setting wrong at her work which is treating her phone as something else? - perhaps she changed her phone without telling them? .vcs is an older format than .ics

 

[svim]

So the common factor is the outgoing Outlook 2003. You use Gmail on your S5 but what mail app are you using? Also what mail service and which mail app is she using on her Note?

 

[Stuart Leetham]

Hi and thanks for looking at this for me.

After I posted yesterday we did some further testing.

Some further background. My partner previously had a Galaxy Note 4 and used the default Samsung email client and s-Planner. On this phone everything worked fine.

Her work mail is hosted by JustHost.com

On the new Note 5, she was using the default Samsung email client and s-Planner and the received invites have a .vcs attachment that is 0 KB in size, so no data.

Testing yesterday involved the Outlook mail client. On this the invites turned up but had no attachment at all. Gave up on the Outlook App and went back to the Samsung Mail App

As a test, we saved a calendar appointment, using the "save as" command, as a .ics file and then attached this file to the appointment before sending. In this case the Samsung Mail App received the invitation and showed both .vcs and .ics attachments and both attachments had size and could be used to create a Calendar event.

She also has a separate personal email address using gmail, and has this setup using the gmail mail client. Invitations sent to this email address turn up with an .ics attachement and will create a calendar appointment.

As a further test we set up her work email address in the gmail client. In this case the invitations turn up with the content of the .ics file in the body of the message and with no attachment. That is, invitations received in the gmail client work fine if sent to a gmail address, but fail if through the JustHost mail server. This seems to indicate that the JustHost mail process may be at fault, however, this all worked before on the previous phone, the Galaxy Note 4 using the just the default Apps and using the JostHost mail servers.

While we identified some work-arounds, they are not suitable long term solutions.

 

[svim]

Apparently things do seem to boil down to her JustHost mail service. On a computer try logging into her JustHost webmail account and see if maybe there's some option buried in the Settings. As things were OK with the previous Samsung mail app maybe it's just some ics version compatibility thing.
https://login.justhost.com/cgi/webmail

Since she already has a Gmail account and the Gmail app worked out in your tests, you could add her JustHost account to the Gmail app.
https://my.justhost.com/cgi/help/getting-started-with-email

If she'd prefer to just leave the Gmail app tied only to her Gmail account, while the default Samsung mail app is OK for basics it doesn't really allow for much extensibility. It was odd that the Outlook app didn't work out but there plenty of really good third-party, reputable mail client apps that all have more feature sets than the default mail app. A really popular alternative is 'AquaMail Pro. My favorite is the long-standing, Open Source 'K-9 Mail' app.

https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=org.kman.AquaMail
https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=org.kman.AquaMail.UnlockerMarket

https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.fsck.k9&hl=en


P.S. They're still using Outlook 2003 at your work place?