Google Calendar spam is not a new phenomenon; it has plagued Google Calendar users for years and spam seems to come and go in waves. Recently, users started to report an increase in Google Calendar spam. Spam comes in many forms but the two main categories fall into advertising and outright malicious messages.
Google Calendar customers who did not receive spam invites up until now may wonder how that invite got accepted in first place; it is easy to explain: Google Calendar has a feature that automatically adds invitations to Calendar.
All an attacker needs to do is send you an invite using the right format and et voila, the invite becomes visible in Google Calendar.
What makes this particularly problematic, besides the fact that this feature is opt-out and not opt-in, is that the mobile Google Calendar application does not even have the option to disable this.
If you still receive spam after making that change, follow the instructions below:
Note that you may need to disable the "show declined events" on the mobile Calendar application as well if you still see those there and use it.
Disabling automatic invites could make things a little less comfortable for Google customers who share calendars with others and used to use the auto-invite system in the past.
Now You: Do you use Google Calendar? Did you receive spam as of lately? (via Caschy)
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Ghacks is a technology news blog that was founded in 2005 by Martin Brinkmann. It has since then become one of the most popular tech news sites on the Internet with five authors and regular contributions from freelance writers.
The was probably the first change I made to the default settings when I started using Calendar when it launched–when was it? …well over a decade ago. I’ve never seen any usefulness in this setting, but then I’m not one of those auto-this/auto-that kind of guys.
Thank you! Yesterday, I was spammed relentlessly by Google Calendar informing me about the iPhone X…even though I have an Android. That was really obnoxious.
Also report all that spam crap so Google’s algos know! So annoying.
Somehow You’ve Won an iPhone XR has been added to my calendar.
Thanks….I grudgingly still use GMail and G Calendar so these procedures are nice to know.
I had already changed these settings and I still got spam yesterday. I noticed that each calendar has its own “Auto-accept invitations” setting, and now I’ve also switched them to “Do not show invitations”. Hopefully this will fix it.
Unfortunately, this did not help me, even though I made the exact same settings as shown above. I still receive emails from myself telling me that I have accepted an invitation from someone. I haven’t even opened the invite as it came in overnight, so no chance I accepted it myself.
What is the cause of this? How can the acceptance of an invite be forced by someone else? And, more important, how do I stop it?