Outlook html email and calendar appointment

Question

I'm trying to achieve a way of sending a html email (with links) in outlook while also sending a related calendar appointment that goes directly into the users calendar without them having to open each individual .ics attachment.

So far I have achieved several variations of this but none are exactly what are required.

Problematic variations achieved:

1. HTML email with .ics as attachment (the problem with this is that each .ics attachment must be opened by the user in order for it to be entered into the calendar. The user will get many of these emails every day and will not be bothered opening each attachment).

2. Sending the emails as HTML and then using the Exchange Web Service to automatically create appointments in the users calendar. (I've subsequently been told that we will not have access to these user's password and that even if we did that they would change often) so I cannot use this method even though in my opinion it works the best.

3. Appointment going directly into calendar but the HTML does not display links. This is ideally what I want but I can't get the alternate views to work using html and a calendar so the links in the body of the email don't work.

4. Sending the calendar in directly in the email and having an inline html document attachment. Again the problem with this is that although the appointment is entered automatically the html must be double clicked to open it.

I've also looked into putting the HTML in the appointment but calendar appointments only accept plain text or RTF.

If anybody could help me achieve this either through point 3 above (alternate views) or if you have any other suggestions as to how to approach this I would be very grateful.

Answer 1

I am surprised you can automatically populate a users calendar with ics items as this presents a security risk for the users system. A user should have control whether a file attachment is allowed to be opened by their system. I realise .ics files contain ICAL formatted text and not binary data but the user should still have the option. At the very least you should not be able to enter links in the calendar items as this could be easily exploited by spammers.