I am trying to design an application where the following events take place in order:
- An invite.ics file is created in PHP.
- An email is created with the invite attachment and sent from a specific email address through PHP (let's say organizer@gmail.com). It is sent to both the organizer and one other recipient (invitee@gmail.com).
- invitee@gmail.com logs into his/her email client and RSVPs "Yes".
- organizer@gmail.com receives the "Accepted: (event name)" email indicating that invitee@gmail.com has accepted the invite.
- Inbound email parser captures this email and puts it into my system; the system now knows that invitee@gmail.com has accepted the outbound invitation.
At step 4, things break down; the "Accepted: (event name)" email doesn't go to the organizer when the invitee RSVPs.
However, if I manually go into Google Calendar (logged in as organizer@domain.com), create an event, then invite invitee@gmail.com, it works fine. That is, when invitee@gmail.com RSVPs to that invite, organizer@gmail.com DOES get the "Accepted: (event name)" email.
I've compared the contents of the .ics files that are created in both cases, and they are virtually identical (except a few trivial things like description, etc.), so that can't be the reason for the discrepancy.
My inference is that the calendar event has to actually be ON organizer@gmail.com's calendar in order to get the RSVP responses from the invitees... it's not enough to just be the organizer. But after exhaustive search I've not been able to confirm this.
Does anyone have any experience with this? Do I need to get the Google Calendar API involved? Hopefully there's a much simpler way to do this that I'm missing.
Thank you.