Unable to delete calendar invites on my Calendar App after macOS Sequoia update

Hi, Yes, this resolves the current issue, but any new invite will stick as read-only, and you'll forever enable and disable it to get rid of these items. This is a workaround at best, and if you have a work calendar with thousands of items, the rebuild takes a long time, depending on server congestion.

Please keep it open; it's not a solution for enterprise customers. And yes, they love AppleMail and Calendar because Outlook or Google Calendar don't have this issue. It's a macOS issue. Why can't it toggle the read-only attribute via a terminal script?

This has been a really irritating issue. I'm on a listserv for work and whenever they send an invite (+ reminders) all of them clog my calendar even if I'm not attending that event. My Outlook calendar doesn't have that invite after I decline, and the email itself is deleted, but Apple calendar helpfully remembers and shows them to me.

Same issue. I've tried responding to events and deleting them and I just can't get them to go away.

Hi everybody, had the same problem. Here is what worked for me as a local solution:

1) Go to the calendar view in your exchange account (e.g. outlook) and create a new calendar under your exchange account e-mail (in Outlook in calendar view, click on the three points beside your e-mail and choose "new folder")

2) name this calendar for example "items to be deleted"

3) sync your calendar - that should make it appear in your Apple calendar

4) switch to your Apple calendar app and see if the new calendar has appeared

5) if so, select one or all non-wanted items, and assign them to the newly created calendar ("items to be deleted")

6) switch back to calendar view in your exchange account app

7) delete the newly created calendar ("items to be deleted") - click on the three points and choose "delete folder"

8) sync your calendar - that should make it disappear from your Apple calendar

Finished! I hope it works for you, too

It's over four months later, and the issue is still here. I'm rebuking large calendars weekly to remove canceled meetings. These particular people do not want to use Outlook or another client that does not have this issue.

AppleMail. Does anyone read these except us? Are Apple engineering moderators listening or maybe Apple intelligence could cull these and bring them to their attention? I'm up for a terminal script ( if available?) to remove the read-only attribute for the invite.

Have you given the “void” calendar option a try? I agree it’s crazy this is even a problem, but for me moving these read only events to another calendar then simply hiding that calendar has worked fine.

for me the issue seems to appear whenever someone sends invites to exchange mailing lists, like “Seattle-HR-All” instead of addressing the event to individual email addresses.

I haven’t yet tried adding the mailing list to my contact card, some people claim that solves it also. But to me that’s not ideal as then your own contact card could have tons of these mailing list addresses.

I did this, but it only works temporarily: unwanted calendar events will build up in future and you'll have to do it again. I had hoped it would fix the problem, but it only clears out the garbage.

Agreed. Still the same 4 months later. I tried adding an email address to the contact card, but that does NOT work.

In my case, all of the 'phantom' objects are for Events that I've declined but were sent to a list address OR Events that I was listed as the "organizer" for but were NOT created in Calendar.app (either crated in OWA or MS Teams).

So I did some additional checking. ALL of the Events in my exchange account that show the "This event was imported (read-only)" message have the following things in common.

1. It does not matter whether the organizer shows as me or not

2. It does not matter whether I am in the 'To' list or received the invite as part of a list.

3. For events where I AM the Organizer, the Event was NOT created via Calendar.app.

And then did a BUNCH of testing to see what would / would not result in a 'phantom' Events that could not be deleted.

I added the mailing list email address for several 'phantom' Events to my contact card. I closed all apps after saving to Contact, verified the updated details showed up in my contact card on iCloud.com (I don't have any contacts in my exchange account and I don't think Exchange has a concept of a "me" contact card anyway), and then rebooted. I still see the events and cannot delete them.

I also noticed that I could NOT delete events where I WAS in the TO list OR where I was the organizer and the event was created outside Calendar.app (M$ Teams or OWA).

I also tested whether having an "online meeting" changed anything - it did not.

Additionally, I found that cancelling Events that I had scheduled outside of Calendar.app resulted in 'phantom' Events that still could not be deleted - even though they no longer show up in OWA, on mobile (iPhone / iPad) or M$ Teams.

Finally, for meetings that were addressed directly to me, I no longer have an option to change my response option from 'accepted' to 'decline' or 'tentative' (maybe) either. So there is no way to REMOVE ANY Events in Calendar.app any longer.

Guess I'll be using OWA and Teams for everything now.. Might as well stop using Mail.app as well since I'll have to be in OWA anyway.

Suffering the same problem. Exchange events showing as imported read only at random. Some are ok, some are problematic. Originally It seem to be coinciding with me set as organiser. I tried to remove myself as organiser in web Outlook. Result... random :(

It's not just a MS Exchange issue, but also affects Google Calendar imports and, I imagine, any other similar systems.

Prior to Sequoia, there was seamless two-way integration between ical across devices and Google Calendar - I run my life cross-platform, so I need calendars that work on whatever machine is needed and Google has always provided that. I have always been able to create events in iCal which are directly hosted on Google Calendar, then edit them as I wish on any of my computers or handheld devices without a hitch.

However, after Sequoia arrived, that interoperability went.

I have managed to resolve this by adding the Google email identifier (a very random, very long email address that is only referenced in iCal) into all of my contact cards on the various systems. iCal now identifies me as the sender of the events, as that weird email address is locally associated with my user accounts on all of those various devices.

This suggests that, whilst Apple may have highlighted an issue, their security protocols are working and the issue is that the non-Apple calendar servers are causing the mismatch by using random identifiers, rather than the user account identifiers we might expect. Both approaches make sense from a security perspective, but what is needed is a system where the unique identifier used by Exchange or Google etc is then translated back into the user-expected identifier (ie their logon email), so that the system can be accessed as expected in whatever 3rd party system as required. IE the tech giants need to talk!

In my case the MacOS 15.4.1 update made things worse. I had previously worked around this by changing my default exchange email address to the same as my default Microsoft userID. This was a workaround (had to use an email address with numbers in it, not the easy-to-remember alias I'd be using for 15 years) but it overcame the calendar problem.

As of the 15.4.1 update, all my exchange calendar invite are showing as read-only. ALL of them. And they all list my old email address, the one that is not the same as my MS userID, even though I haven't used that address in months. No clue what to do next, because the workaround seems to have been broken, so I'm just left with a mess.

This is so annoying

The VOID strategy works, but it's a real hack (albeit a clever one!). I was hoping Apple might have fixed this, but having just "upgraded" to 15.5 I see it's still broken.

I've tried the idea of adding the email alias to my contacts but this doesn't seem to have worked. Anyone who's got this to work, could you give us some more details? Is it the Apple contact list or the Outlook contact list?

While I don't know who wrote the Exchange connector on MacOS, I am willing to bet this to be an Apple problem.