Going GUI...er

[Sam Kuper]

On Sun, Apr 05, 2020 at 01:08:05PM -0700, mutt at amrx.net wrote:
> On Sun, Apr 05, 2020 at 08:48:35PM +0100, Sam Kuper wrote:
>> If/when it becomes possible to RSVP, in a machine-readable fashion
>> directly from Mutt, to calendar-invites-sent-via-email, I'll switch
>> to that.
>
> No!  The ultimate goal should be do accept calendar invitations from
> your calendar!

I'm not opposed to this in principle.

But first of all, this isn't primarily about my calendar (which might be
on paper, or on an offline PDA), it's about RSVPing to invitations sent
by other people who do use digital calendars, so that they don't have to
manually record the contents of my RSVP on my behalf.

I would not want to put them to that trouble if I could easily avoid it.

Secondly, even if I had a piece of calendaring software on my PC that I
wanted to use for accepting calendar invitations - as you suggest -
which protocol should it use for retrieving and replying to those
invitations?  Where should it retrieve them from, and where should it
send the responses?  How should I identify my friend John Smith
<johnsmith at example.com> from his and my mutual friend John Smith
<yo.there at example.net>, if not by their email addresses?  How would any
of these processes be secured from malfeasance?  These are genuine
questions.

I guess you might suggest CalDAV over HTTPS as the protocol, and propose
that my PC's calendaring software should be a CalDAV client.  Also that
I should run a CalDAV server that can receive meeting invites and that
can also forward RSVPs from me to other people's CalDAV servers.  And
perhaps that I should continue to use email addresses as identifiers
though not calendar invite/RSVP destinations.

But I'm not aware of any calendaring software that supports anything
close to all of this.  So, I'm open to enlightenment.


> Your mail client is reserved for reading email.  MIME attached ics
> files to coordinate meeting attendance is an atrocity. 

As long as it isn't abused as some kind of substitute for having a
text/plain message, how is it any more of an atrocity than any other
kind of attachment?  (Again, this is a genuine question.)


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