Take Control of iCal Invitation Replies

In the comments to last week's post on the caveats of using invitations with iCal, a reader pointed out John Maisey's iCal Reply Checker. As it turns out, that little utility delivers a set of useful options that should have been built into iCal all along.

To quickly recap: whenever you receive an event invitation in iCal, the Edit panel of that event presents you with three buttons: "Maybe", "Accept", and "Deny". Every time you click one of these buttons, or whenever you make changes to this setting in the event later, iCal sends out emails with your reply -- one to the event's organizer, and one each to every invited attendee. And you have no control whatsoever over sending out these emails. iCal Reply Checker fixes this oversight.

iCal Reply Checker modifies the actual iCal application, so, before you can use the software, you need to "add" it while running as an administrator. Once that's been done, you launch the utility to set its preferences (without requiring admin access rights), and it remembers them individually for every account on your machine.

iCal Reply Checker's main window.

So which options are there? iCal Reply Checker has three operation modes:

• never send out reply emails, with the option of showing a notification whenever the utility has blocked an email from going out;

• ask on an individual basis for every email, and you can choose whether "Send" is the default button, or "Don't send";

• send all replies.

Additionally, iCal Reply Checker can bring up the outgoing emails in Mail, so you can edit them before they are sent out.

The confirmation dialog for sending out an invitation reply. Unfortunately, it does not support the Escape or Control-D keys for the "Don't Send" key.

iCal Reply Checker works like a charm and offers exactly those options that make sense with regard to event invitations. When configuring the software's option, do keep in mind, however, that it controls every email sent by iCal, including invitations that you initiate!

The only serious limitation I could find, is that iCal Reply Checker will only work when iCal is run in English, i.e., when the system-wide language preferences are set to English. When testing the software with other languages -- Dutch and German, to be precise --, it failed to do anything. In other words, it did not break the software, and I could still send and receive invitations; but it did not keep replies from being sent out, either.

As I said above, iCal Reply Checker offers options that should be built right into iCal already. Until Apple does add them, you can trust this little utility to offer you much better control over your invitation events.

iCal Reply Checker is a 152kB download and requires Mac OS X 10.4 or 10.5. The software is donationware, so if you use, please do consider paying for it via a donation.