[Kolab-devel] RSVP handling question

[Till Adam]

On Monday 11 October 2004 12:47, Till Adam wrote:

> RFC2445 unhelpfully states with respect to RSVP:
>
> "Purpose: To specify whether there is an expectation of a favor of a
>    reply from the calendar user specified by the property value."
>
> So should kolab clients honor the RSVP attribute and only send replies to
> the organizer on accept/decline if it is set, or should we (Kontact) do
> what we currently do and always send such messages?
>
> Joon, I believe the connector respects it, and requires it to be set, in
> order to generate reply emails?

I talked to Joon on irc and he informed me that the semantics of RSVP in 
Outlook are somewhat different from what iCal specifies and what Kontact 
tries to do. Apparently OL doesn't have a global switch to enable/disable 
sending of invitation/reply mails. In order for messages to be sent, they 
(ab)use the rsvp flag of the individual attendee. In other words, if you get 
invited by OL, the flag will always be set. 

So with invitations coming from OL the current Kontact behavior of always 
sending replies is correct, since the flag is always set. In Kontact, the 
flag is off by default, so it usually sends out invitations without that 
flag. Since that disables the sending of all mail on the OL end, you'll never 
hear back from OL users, unless you set RSVP to true. That also makes sense.

Now, if one Kontact user invites another, with the flag off, as per default, 
the receiving Kontact will still send out a reply, thereby ignoring the RSVP 
flag of the attendee. That's wrong.

There are now two mostly orthogonal things we could (and I think should) do:

1) change the default value for RSVP in Kontact to true, so that OL users will
    send replies back, by default. This is then consistent with the OL 
    behavior in the other direction.

2) Respect the RSVP flag when processing incoming invitations. The OL client 
    will always set it, so no change there, and Kontact users can use it, if
    they are only dealing with other Kontact users, where the option is
    meaningfull.

Makes sense?

Till
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