Add-ons
Show Outlook Appointments (vcal / ics) 0.2.3 Requires Restart
by Sebastian Hammerl
An extension to show embedded Outlook calendar (vcal / ics) parts.
Thunderbird doesn't show calendar parts from Outlook appointment emails. This addon adds a button to download the embedded appointment as ICS to import it into another calendar.
![[Warning]](https://addons.thunderbird.net/static/img/developers/test-warning.png?b=58a99cbb-667a0970)
Permissions
About this Add-on
For a long time I did not even know that Outlook silently sends calendar appointments via email and how all this works. In the last year more and more colleagues and customers of my company started using Outlook for appointments and I wondered always about empty emails or emails which do not make sense at all.
At some point I discovered that there are calendar appointments attached to the emails which are just not displayed by my Thunderbird.
When searching the Internet for a solution and following the bug report on mozilla (https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=505024) there currently seems to be only one solution for this problem: Installing the Lightning extension.
As I am not using Lighting and am not willing to install a huge extension only to read these Outlook appointments I decided to create a lightweight extension with exactly one purpose. I hope I can help others with this extension and perhaps end a 10 year long debate on the bugtracker if Outlook is doing it wrong or whatever. At some point I just needed a solution which works.
When opening a message the content is scanned for alternative parts. This btw is the reason Thunderbird does not display the calendar entry. Normally an appointment consists of three parts: text, html and calendar which are all marked as alternatives. Therefore according to RFCs only one has to be shown and Thunderbird prefers text or html.
When found, a button "Download ICS" is shown (has to be added by customizing the bar first) and a large image is shown in the header bar of the message.
Please let me know if anything does not work for you. Create an issue on Github ( https://github.com/sebastianha/sfoa/issues ), best with an example message where you would expect an embedded appointment.
At some point I discovered that there are calendar appointments attached to the emails which are just not displayed by my Thunderbird.
When searching the Internet for a solution and following the bug report on mozilla (https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=505024) there currently seems to be only one solution for this problem: Installing the Lightning extension.
As I am not using Lighting and am not willing to install a huge extension only to read these Outlook appointments I decided to create a lightweight extension with exactly one purpose. I hope I can help others with this extension and perhaps end a 10 year long debate on the bugtracker if Outlook is doing it wrong or whatever. At some point I just needed a solution which works.
When opening a message the content is scanned for alternative parts. This btw is the reason Thunderbird does not display the calendar entry. Normally an appointment consists of three parts: text, html and calendar which are all marked as alternatives. Therefore according to RFCs only one has to be shown and Thunderbird prefers text or html.
When found, a button "Download ICS" is shown (has to be added by customizing the bar first) and a large image is shown in the header bar of the message.
Please let me know if anything does not work for you. Create an issue on Github ( https://github.com/sebastianha/sfoa/issues ), best with an example message where you would expect an embedded appointment.
