Thank you very much for the response, Josias! I appreciate it.
Hopes going up
Your message gave me a lot of hope, and it also gave me an idea. Specifically these parts:
When
notify_participants=true:
Google Calendar uses
sendUpdates=all, which tells Google to “send notifications to all guests” - but Google decides how to notify them:
- Google participants: Usually just a calendar notification (no email)
and
For Google Calendar specifically, rely on Google’s native behavior: when you use
notify_participants=true, Google already handles same-provider participants more gracefully (calendar notifications vs emails).
My new idea can also be half-attributed to this other answer I found having to do with the calendar-api before that I read before I made my post:
With the Nylas Calendar API, you can only control the calendar of connected accounts (internal interviewers). The recipient will receive a calendar invite via email that they can add to their calendar manually.
Testing the new theory
So then I thought, maybe its only silent and doesn’t send an email when it’s the same domain! (It’s a case I don’t remember the result of because testing it on my own is difficult.) And I found that it does send simply send emails with ICS attachments and doesn’t detect that they’re both Google emails within the same domain:
| Events sent from | To internal Gmail domain | To @gmail.com |
|---|---|---|
| internal Gmail domain | Received invite emails with ICS attachments  |
Received invite emails with ICS attachments |
@gmail.com |
Received invite emails with ICS attachments | Received invite emails with ICS attachments |
Result – hopes crashed back down:
Calendar invites from internal Google emails to internal Google emails still receive emails with ICS attachments rather than getting added/invited to the calendar silently.
For the moment, we’ve chosen to keep Gmail silent (with notify_participants=false) and not work cross-functionally with other email providers, as our use case mostly has to do with corporate events, where the email domain of the calendar owner and invitees are the same. But I’ll admit it’s disappointing.