My calendar is sending inappropriate meeting notices
I have a major problem which is making my Thunderbird calendar very difficult to use. Whenever I accept a meeting invitation or change an event, my system is sending an email to every person on the invite list as if I were creating a new meeting.
For instance, if someone invites me and 10 other people to a meeting on Monday at 10:00AM, and I click Accept, this happens: The host, the 10 other invitees, and I all receive an email saying that I am inviting them to a meeting on Monday at 10:00AM. If I delete the meeting from my calendar, this happens: The host, the 10 other invitees, and I all receive an email saying that I have cancelled the meeting. To be clear, the notices don't say that I have accepted or declined the host's meeting; the notices say that I am inviting everyone to a meeting, or that I am cancelling a meeting.
This makes it impossible for me to use the calendar as designed. I don't want to spam my clients with improper meeting notices, so I cannot accept meeting invitations; I can only put meetings into my calendar manually.
I originally sought help by posting here: http://forums.mozillazine.org/viewtopic.php?f=39&t=3069567
The feedback I received on that post suggests that the problem is my CalDAV server and a setting called "calendar-auto-schedule", not Thunderbird. I opened a ticket with my web host, but they wrote back that they could find no problems on their side.
I am hoping someone can help me to understand the problem and to document it so I can go back to my web host and force them to fix it. Either that, or help me to find a workaround.
-TC
All Replies (4)
I have seen similar behavior when the original meeting invitation was sent from an Exchange or Office 365 server. It happens occasionally, but not all the time. I don't know what is causing the problem in the first place or how to fix it. My best guess is it's related to a malformed meeting invitation.
Christ1,
Thank you for the suggestion. However, I have given up on trying to fix this problem.
I cannot afford to experiment with solutions. Every time my calendar sends a misleading meeting notice to a client or a colleague, it makes me look incompetent and affects my business. Therefore, the only safe option is to abandon CalDAV completely and immediately. I spent a couple of hours this weekend copying events from all my CalDAV calendars to local calendars. I will no longer be able to share my calendars among different devices, but I see no other way to deal with this.
In my previous post, I expressed the opinion that the problem was with my CalDAV server, not Thunderbird. Now I am not so sure. Even with local calendars, I've found that Thunderbird will sometimes send meeting notices without getting my approval beforehand, and some of those meeting notices are inappropriate (albeit a lot fewer than when I was using CalDAV). I don't know why this problem exists in the first place. I would think the obvious default behavior for meeting notices should be that whenever the calendar thinks a meeting notice is warranted, it should compose a meeting notice and present it to the user as an email ready to send, leaving it to the user to decide whether to click Send or Cancel. That would be easy to understand and would work 100% of the time. In contrast, the current rules seem unpredictable and arbitrary, and sometimes don't work.
-TC
Your problem is probably with the latest version of Thunderbird (78.8) having issues with the Lightening AddOn.
Have issues my self with no solve in sight (my calendars will not sync at all).
Your problem is probably with the latest version of Thunderbird (78.8) having issues with the Lightening AddOn.
As of Thunderbird 78 there is no Lightning add-on anymore.