.vcs Mail attachment - iCal opens, but appointment doesn't show up

Question

I've received a .vcs file attachment in an email confirming an appointment I made online. iCal isn't importing it automatically, so I have to "launch" it -- and then iCal does recognize it, and asks which calendar I want to add it to - so far so good - but, then nothing shows up in iCal.
Am I missing a setting somewhere? Or is it more likely an improperly formatted .vcs file? (My understanding is that iCal is supposed to be able to import .vcs files, and it seems to be attempting to do so.)
Any ideas?

Answer 1

I think we may have figured it out for our purposes.
I wasn't receiving a .vcs attachment in an email, I was copying and pasting the generated .vcs code from a webpage to a text file, saving then importing into iCal. The problem was that I was using TextEdit to do so, which is a RTF editor, so even changing the extension afterwards to .vcs didn't do any good.
The solution: I needed to use a pure text editor. So I tried BBEdit, and someone else tried Smultron. Saved the text file as a .vcs, dragged the file icon into iCal and voila! that worked. I also tried MS Word on Mac, and as long as you changed the format to "Text Only" when saving it also worked.
After re-reading about the attachment problem, I wanted to make sure there wasn't that issue either. I tested that by saving the file as .vcs on a PC using notepad. Sending myself the file from my PC and checking my email/saving off file on the Mac. That import worked as well.
I don't know if that will help you at all. But I thought I'd share....