Over the last several days, our Outlook and Exchange support teams have noted an increase in the number of cases opened where customers are seeing a calendar invite sent over and over again, even with no interaction on their devices. Usually we will send our support article to our customers, but there have been questions over how would we see it inside our own environment.
In some cases, this is what we will see in our Outlook Inbox:
Then, for the actual meeting, we will see something similar to below:
One of the questions we get is why is this happening? What can be done to stop it?
We have been able to work with Apple and determine is that all of these users all happen to have an iOS device, which was recently updated. From what we can tell, the location field is what is triggering the issue. We would have the time to leave and location field will somehow trigger this and then send a SmartForward. When this happens, all recipients will then get a ‘copy’ of the updated meeting.
What if I suspect I have this issue?
There is a way to tell if you have this issue! The first step would be for you to create a ticket with Premier Support via the Premier Support Portal! If you do not have a Premier Service contract, you can also open up a case with our Professional Support Incident team. We will require the following data:
- Calendar Diagnostic Logs from the “Get-CalendarDiagnosticLog” cmdlet. This data will need to be from the meeting originator (in our example above, from Tony G.) and the Send on behalf user. (In our example above, we would need it from Lee S.)
- We may also need Active Sync Mailbox logging, however you need to check with your Support Professional first.
Within these logs, your support professional will look for specific calls from the affected devices and if we see the SmartForward triggered in a certain way. Please understand we have to be fairly vague about how this call is made, and your support professional may not be able to give you additional details.
Workarounds:
- Use Outlook for iOS.
- Remove the location of the meeting.
- Disable the “Time to Leave” feature via the “Settings > Calendar > Default Alert times” commands
We are working with Apple on getting a fix pushed to these devices. We do not have a timetable at the time of this blog writing. As we get updates to this issue, I’ll update my blog article here, or you can always check out EHLO as well.