I came across a great hint in Mac OS X Hints today. It seems that there’s an easy way to interrupt the process of sending an email reply when accepting iCal invites. As I tend to play around with iCal invites a lot (adding and deleting the same event ad nauseum) — I love this.

I wrote up a modified script like in the example and bundled it with a shell script, to install and uninstall the modification. You have to run this shell script using sudo from the CLI (Command Line Interface aka Terminal.app).

The zip file contains the shell script, the modified Mail.scpt AppleScript, and the original Mail.scpt AppleScript.

• To install run sudo /path/to/iCal_Reply_Send.sh install
• To uninstall run sudo /path/to/iCal_Reply_Send.sh revert
• To check usage and status, run /path/to/iCal_Reply_Send.sh

If you don’t like messing with the CLI then there’s a great little shareware app, iCal Reply Checker that does it all, and more. It seems that neither method interferes with the code signing of iCal as the script in question is not code signed.

Update It appears that if you’re using an Exchange account in Mail.app that this script is being bypassed and this hint won’t work for you. :-(