I'm developing a ASP.NET application which integrates with GMail API and Google Calendar API. It uses a GSuite account to manage calendar events and e-mails.
Basically the application sends e-mails, invitations to people creating calendar events and, if an attendee declines the invitation, the application unsubscribes the user from the event and deletes the invitation.
The issue: everything works fine if the attendee uses GMail, else the declination is not received:
- the attendee receives the invitation in GMail and selects "No" as response: the response is received
- the attendee receives the invitation in another mail client and clicks the "No" link inside the mail: the response is received
- the attendee receives the invitation in another mail client and rejects the invitation with any button provided by the mail client: the status in Google Calendar remains "awaiting response"
I found this behaviour using a standard GMail account too, so I suppose it does not depend on GSuite or my code. I googled a lot to see if this is a known issue, but I cannot find anything.
Does someone know if it is a known issue or there is any solution or any option to activate support for event responses?
Thank you very much for your help!
EDIT
I finally found the following:
- the application creates a new calendar for managing its events -> invitations are managed as if they were from a different user and responses from attendees are sent to a [email protected] e-mail address instead of the user's e-mail address, so no mail in GMail, no attendee status changed
- using the primary calendar, I receive the event responses in GMail, but event attendee's status is not updated
- with the second approach, I will try to take actions on new mail messages too.
As much as I can understand Google only supports responses to events using the "Yes", "No" and "Maybe" links in invitation e-mails, but what if a user uses a mail client like Outlook, etc.???
Please note that not all users are smart enough to understand that a link has to be clicked instead of buttons provided by mail clients and, anyway, I would expect that it works too.