iCloud is hijacking Meeting Invitations

While working with a client to migrate an email account to Office 365 mailbox to replace an IMAP account and iCloud, we sent messages and meeting requests to the address to confirm everything was working correctly.

The meeting requests I sent from my Outlook arrived in the new mailbox, while requests sent from a family member’s iPhone were automatically added to the user’s iCloud calendar. The address associated with the new Office 365 account was not the user’s Apple ID but that address was configured in the native iOS mail client.

The cause: a setting in iCloud.com’s Calendar preferences tells iCloud to intercept meeting requests and add them to iCloud calendar. While this might be useful if you only use iPhone to manage your calendar, it is not helpful when you don’t want to use the iCloud or use an account that syncs a calendar to the phone.

The solution:

1. Log into iCloud.com
2. Switch to the Calendar
3. Click on the Actions menu icon
4. Select Settings
   
5. Select Account tab
6. At the very bottom, in the Invitations section, choose the option to Email to [Apple ID address], not In-app notifications, and Save. (The meeting invite will be sent to the address on the invitation, not to the Apple ID address shown on the dialog.)
   

Note that even though the meeting invitation is not sent to the Apple ID address, it can be hijacked by iCloud if you use the iOS Mail and Calendar apps and the invitation is sent from an Apple device.