Calendar Invite Opens Blank Webpage While Downloading

[Anonymous]

When I use a calendar invite token in an email, the link in the email opens a blank tab in the browser and begins downloading the calendar invite. I would like it to either download the invite without opening a new page, open a page with text that says "Your calendar invited has begun downloading", or at least send people to one of our webpages while it downloads. What can I do?

[SanfordWhiteman]

You can't avoid opening the browser to download the ICS file, because it's an http:// link and the mail client would have no way of knowing what lies at the end of the tracking link. If the browser is already open -- if the user is using a webmail client, this is always true -- you can't prevent it from opening a new tab, because again the webmail client is doing what it would do if you sent a link to a page (as opposed to a link to a download).

You can defuse the extra tabs in some environments if you turn off tracking on the ICS link.  But you probably don't want to lose that tracking.

So let's look at the fallback option of having the user see an "... is now downloading..." page.  I think this may be overkill as you're giving the person something else to read when they might fully understand what's going on.  But if you wanted to do it, you could have an interstitial LP that automatically downloads whatever file is passed in a query param.  You'd have to get the path to the ICS file (which you can see if you follow the standard ICS link).  Call that path <path_to_ics>.  Then have the email link to https;//example.com/<redirector_lp>?download=<path_to_ics>.

[Anonymous]

Hey Sanford Whiteman, thanks for the response. This makes a lot of sense. I like the idea of creating a landing page that automatically downloads the calendar invite but where do you set up/edit a path?

Thanks again, this was very helpful.

[SanfordWhiteman]

This makes a lot of sense. I like the idea of creating a landing page that automatically downloads the calendar invite but where do you set up/edit a path?

You can create an LP with the following HTML block:

<script>
var redirectLoc = document.createElement('A');
redirectLoc.href = document.location.search.substring(1); // don't create an open redirector
if (redirectLoc.pathname) {
         document.location.pathname = redirectLoc.pathname;
  }  
</script>

Then when you visit the LP with

  http://go.example.com/redirect.html?/path_to_ics.ics

you'll be redirected to the ICS file.

Also disable Munchkin on the LP.