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

I received a company wide invite for a weekly event.

I deleted it from the outlook/teams calendar but it still appeared in Mac's calendar.

I got rid of it by disabling my exchange account in calendar.

But I also got rid of all the other events from that account.

I reenabled the account and as soon as the next invite came in, all my others were also back, except for the deleted one.

I have the same problem too, and I've spent *many* hours working on it.

But I don't think it's simply an Apple problem. I've talked with friends/colleagues who upgraded to Sequoia and are using an Exchange calendar through the built-in Mac Calendar app just fine.

I think it's a combination of changes apple made in Sequoia with permissions and security settings on the Exchange server side. In one way or another, the exchange server is not recognizing the MacOS Calendar app as having proper permissions to read/write to the Exchange calendar.

So either Apple needs to update Sequoia so that when you add your exchange calendar it meets the requirements on the server side, or the server-side settings need to be altered to give Sequoia calendar full access. I've tried to message my IT people who run the exchange server, but their usual response is "no."

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.

Just following up to say that the MacOS 15.2 update did not fix the problem for me.

My problem remains: if I use a default email address different from my Microsoft Account login ID, then any invited calendar events show up as "read-only" on the Mac.**

Those same invitation calendar events still work fine on iOS and in Outlook.

**I hypothesize that if my University allowed me to edit my Microsoft 365 profile so that I could list more than one email address, then this problem would disappear. Unfortunately, they refuse to do this.

I continue to believe the root of the problem is that the Mac sees calendar invites sent to one email address while connecting to an exchange account with a different email address. It cannot reconcile that those are the same identities. An update to the Microsoft 365 profile that includes both addresses seems like it would fix this.

Same issue here. It's importing events from my work's Microsoft Exchange email account, and they appear as "This event was imported (read-only)" and it's impossible to get rid of them. Strangely, when I open the SAME calendar in Office 365 / Outlook Calendar, those events do NOT appear (as I have declined them).

There is other people with the same issue in the Microsoft support forum, but Microsoft of course says it's Apple's problem: https://answers.microsoft.com/en-us/msoffice/forum/all/how-to-stop-automatic-read-only-calendar-events/cd6cb278-7ad6-4414-97ef-33bcd8c334ed

Just to confirm what Armando wrote a few weeks ago: as of MacOS 15.2 the problem is not fixed, but the workaround is much easier. Toggling the exchange calendar account off/on will now no longer re-populate previously declined invites.

For me, the problem now seems to be more narrow: if you receive an exchange calendar invite and RESPOND to it in the apple notifications by "declining," the message seems to be sent correctly to the exchange server (it shows declined in outlook), but the event still shows up in your MacOS calendar, as read-only.

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.

Still no resolution but some further insights:

This issue with calendar events being automatically created with the flag "This event was imported (read-only)" seems to only occur when someone sends a calendar invite to one of our staff mailing lists that I'm part of. So my work email does not appear as part of the invite list but I'm subscribed (system-generated) to the mailing list that the event was sent to. MacOS Calendar picks up all those event invites and pushes them into my MS Exchange work calendar read-only.

I found this Apple Support article, which does not resolve the issue: "If you can’t change a calendar or event on Mac" but it hints at what the problem may be: "If you can’t change an event you created, or you can’t change your status for an event you were invited to, it might be because you’re using an email address in Calendar that isn’t on your card in Contacts. Make sure all your email addresses are listed on your Contacts card." – I haven't tried adding our work mailing lists to my contact card and doing so would be absurd and not a feasible solution.

Do any Apple software engineers actually still read these Discussion threads and could offer some advice or a fix?

For me (Sequoia 15.3.1) company Exchange account has different e-mail from Username and this must be the case/reason for broken Integration of Microsoft calendar into macOs Calendar. Kudos to one researcher: https://forums.macrumors.com/threads/exchange-calendar-in-calendar-app-sequoia-bug.2442155/

I experience (after Apple Intelligence update/introduction) broken Calendar app with Exchange account:

I cannot see Check Availability... function (always loading, query does not complete) which is crucial to set meetings;

I receive meeting invites (and updates) through mail and Calendar / Intelligence only picks up these on the next day when systems wakes up from Sleep;

Which is unacceptable.

Please rollback these Broken updates or fix existing features and make Integrations work again as they should!

I have found that deleting and reinstalling the account, or alternatively switching off the calendar and deleting the data, then switching back on again, only fixes the problem temporarily. All the unwanted events are cleared, but new ones start to populate my diary exactly as before. Like others, I have a university account with an alias email. Adding both alias and regular email addresses to my Contact card makes no difference to the problem. Why cannot Apple fix this issue?

Hi fronesis47

I'm also on an Exchange account that's admin'ed by my university. I'm intrigued by your suggestion to change the default email on a "proprietary profile page" – can you explain what you mean by that? My uni offers the usual Exchange desktop suite plus Office 365 on the web and a university-specific page where I change my uni-wide password every couple of weeks. But I'm not sure what you mean by "proprietary profile page"...?

I note that my official uni email is first name initial dot surname @ uni domain. But the Exchange login is just username @ uni domain, which looks like an email.

Thank you!

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 :(

I'm also a University employee and having the same problem. Deleting the account in Internet Profiles clears out the inaccurate entries as others have said, but then they just start to build back up again. It's getting very frustrating as I can't rely on my own calendar any more. Someone needs to sort this out as it's been a problem since last year.

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.