Looks like my issue has been around for a while (iOS 5.0.1 (iPhone 4s) unable to synchronize with Internet Calendar File (ics)) — has anyone come up with a fix yet? I am trying to sync my iPhone calendars with the calendar on my PC that is in .ics format. The .ics file is located on a home server that allows both me and my wife to see each other’s calendars and its been working great. Now, I want to be able to see my calendar from my iPhone 4 (with OS 6.1) .. and I’ve tried setting it up with: Settings / Mail, Contacts, Calendars / Add Account… / Other / Add Subscribed Calendar. With every possible configuration I can think of, I get the same response:
Calendar Subscription — Unable to verify account information
For server name, I’ve tried actual servername, IP address, etc; we do have security on the server but I put in the account name and password … ‘nuthin! Unable to verify. Through the phone's browser, I am able to open up the folder on our server and see the .ics file. The path is
xxxx.homeserver.com/webcal/nat_calendar.ics.
I've tried sending an invite to myself, opening it in the phone, clicking on the link and I get this error:
Cannot Subscribe: Could not subscribe to the calendar nat_calendar.ics from myservername.
Seems simple. What am I missing here?
Any ideas?
Best Answer
I found the answer to my particular issue. The reason that my iPhone could not subscribe to a published Outlook .ics calendar was because the MIME type of the .ics file was wrong. As recommended in this brilliant post by Joe Bradford, I went into IIS, changed the MIME type from
application/octet-streamtotext/calendar, and iPhone could connect and subscribe without further issue. Success!PS: I did not run into the second issue that Joe chased down, which was having to remove the Byte Order Mark (BOM) from the .ics file via a hexadecimal editor.