One thing I’ll never understand about iCal is its inability to user it to send email reminders to an outside address. For example, Let’s say I want to send an email reminder to my wife and my Dad to remind them to get a gift for Mother’s Day. Right now, i can only use iCal to send one email to one address listed as my home user account. The ability to send an email to another address simply isn’t there. You would assume that because you can add attendees to an appointment in iCal AND set a reminder to email alarm, that the reminder would go out to all the attendees.
There are a few workarounds for this, mind you, but many of them either cost money, or are not convenient to use (i.e run as a seperate app or as an AppleScript). Neither of those fall in line with my criteria for the resolution of this issue. I’m a big fan of free. 
Enter iCalMail. The script creates a seperate calendar in iCal called ‘iCalMail’ that allows you to use the settings of a regular appointment to deliver messages to multiple addresses.
For example, whoever you add to the ‘event name’ will be delivered as the ’subject’ in the outgoing email. The other variables are as follows:
+event name -> subject
+location -> attachment
+attendees -> recipients
+notes field -> message text
+url field -> sender email
As you can see, you can also use it to send attachments out as well.
I’ve already used this a variety of ways. I use it to send appointments to my cell phone at certain times to remind me of an event. I use it to send out messages to a group of people. If you want to go a step beyond, you can create an article for your blog and save the text in the ‘notes’ field of the appointment. Then, set iCal to send this message to your pre-configured WordPress email account…which in turn will post the article to your blog at a specific time. A great tool for those that have writing deadlines.
A great fix for what should have been an included feature. Hopefully Leopard will solve this when it’s *finally* released.
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