Invitations to meetings are delivered to your Inbox and if you have the Calendar preferences Automatically add received appointments to calendar enabled, the meeting is also added to your default Calendar and marked New. You can quickly respond to the invitation either from the Inbox or from the Calendar pane.
Note: When you receive an email invitation as an .ics attachment, click Add to Calendar in the header to save the invitation to your Calendar. Select the calendar where the invitation should be saved.
Open the message that contains the meeting request in either the Inbox or right-click the appointment in the Calendar.
To respond to the meeting invitation, click Accept, Tentative, or Decline. A reply is automatically sent if the creator requested one. You can add comments before you send your response. You can select the calendar that this meeting should be scheduled on. If you do not select a specific calendar, your meeting is saved to the default Calendar.
To add comments to a reply when accepting an invitation from the Calendar View, right-click the invitation and select Edit Reply.
If the time of the meeting is not good for your schedule, but you want to attend the meeting, you can propose a new meeting time. Click Propose New Time to select another time. The meeting organizer receives an email with the proposed time. The meeting organizer can accept or decline the change.
After you make your choice, the email message is moved to the Trash.
By default the message is marked as public. If the creator marked the message as private, the invite is received as private, or if your preferences is set to mark all messages as private, the message will be marked as private on the calendar.
In your calendar, click the meeting notice to review invitations or to see any attachments that may have been sent.
Note: If the creator changes or cancels a meetings that you have accepted or tentatively accepted, the change is automatically made to your calendar.
If you do not want meetings that you have not accepted automatically added to your calendar, you can disable Automatically add received appointments to calendar from the Calendar preferences page. Meetings are added to your calendar only if you click Accept or Tentative to the email invitation. Clicking Decline does not add the appointment to your calendar.
If Automatically add received appointments to calendar is enabled, declined appointments display on your calendar in a faded view, as a reminder of the meeting you declined. You can delete declined message any time.
By default meeting invite messages in your Inbox are moved to the Trash folder when you reply to the invite. If you want the message to remain in your Inbox, in your Calendar preferences, disable After responding to an invitation...Delete invite on reply.