[Kolab-devel] RFC: replies to invitations sent to distribution lists

[Bernhard Reiter]

On Tuesday 11 January 2005 23:39, Till Adam wrote:

> The problem manifesting itself as issue356 seems to be that in the case of
> one or more distribution lists and one or more additional persons as
> attendees of an invitation there is no way to figure out which of the
> attendees is the one representing "us", in other words, which is the one we
> are being invited with. That's important since that entry is the one we
> need to check for RSVP (whether we need to send a reply mail) and for the
> participant role we are invited in. For the case of the lone attendee being
> a distribution list we special case and use that, but as soon as there are
> other attendees as well, there is no way to find the right attendee short
> of an LDAP query, which is out of the question, I think. Since we ask the
> user for the identity to use when answering we can add a new attendee with
> the right name and email address, but for the RSVP and role we have to
> guess.
>
> The attached patch does that guessing by iterating over the list of all
> attendees and if the RSVP and role fields of all of them are the same
> (which will be the case in the vast majority of cases, as far as we can
> predict) it uses those common settings. In case the attendees have
> conflicting RSVP settings we err on the side of safety and send an answer,
> although potentially the organizer did not ask for one. As for the role we
> default to being a required participant, which is probably the most common
> kind.

This seems to be fine overall, I am only thinking about
using "optional" participant instead of required.

> I'm fairly sure the Toltec connector has the same issue, and a quick test
> confirms that, so I propose to adopt the above described scheme for all
> Kolab clients. It should produce expected results in most cases and the
> ramifications in those cases were it does not are tolerable, as far as I
> can tell.

First of all this would be an outlook issue completeley independent of Toltec.
Next I believe that Outlook will just answer with "optional" participant when it doubt.
Seems fine to me considering that an invitation to a distribution list 
might reach several people.

If your patch makes an email go out when I accepted, please apply it. ;)
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