Aaron Douglas:
How do I prevent this from happening in the future? How the hell did it happen? Turns out it’s Apple again – thinking they know better for how you want to use e-mail and calendars. Thankfully there is an option to prevent the forced invites.
These calendar invites aren’t coming from some magic hacked portal in your phone. The invites are coming as e-mails into your iCloud.com e-mail account and then being automatically converted into in-app push notifications to both iOS and macOS. Once that’s done the original e-mail is deleted. Gone. Poof. Magical, yet stabby.
I’m seeing a lot of reports of this. Hopefully, this can put an end to it.
I just got my first one this morning for a Ray Ban sunglass sale or something. Couldn’t figure out how they did it.
I get those now and again and I click on Delete and Report as Spam, as that is what that is.
The worst thing about those bogus Calendar events is that when you change its status to anything (Accept / Decline / Maybe) the spammers will get a response so they’ll know it’s a live email address that is being used. And those accounts will probably get a lot more spamming action than randomly generated email addresses or non-responsive ones.
Also, few if any macOS / iOS users will ever read Aaron Douglas’ blog. Apple needs to take steps to stop this kind of spamming with no effort required by iCloud users. Maybe something like this:
Step 1: Make sure iCloud’s “Receive event invitations as:” option is set to email by default. I can’t remember what it was set to when iCloud first went live, since I originally signed up for “iTools” in January 2000.
Step 2a: Apply some kind of minimal AI to emails that might be auto-converted into calendar invitations. As in “If there is a currency symbol and a relatively well-known brand name in the event title, mark it as possible spam and handle it differently than other invitations.”
Step 2b: Create a Calendar event category called Spam that can handle the results of 2a. Add a button for emptying the Spam events calendar category without sending a response to the inviter.
if you use the Mail.app client on OSX, remember to go to preferences on that as well and turn “add invitations to calendar” to ‘never’. I was getting this trash via my regular email and Mail.app was adding them to the calendar overnight.
I got the same Ray Ban calendar message but my choice included deny and report as spam. Is that new?
Previous to this, maybe a week or so ago, I also got the Ugg boots spam calendar invite but there was no report as spam option.
i don’t think that button exists in calendar app. not on mine anyway
i’m getting these every week.
Another tip, in addition to the above one: if you don’t use iCloud Calendar, you can a) stop syncing it to your devices; b) delete the calendar outright. I don’t use iCloud for calendaring, and that was a nice way of deleting the crap without sending any kind of response notification.
I just got my first one the other day. I hope Apple fixes how they handle calendar invites, because not subjecting them to spam filtering is a big hole.
On your computer or iPhone/iPad?
The option to delete and report as spam was on my iPad.
I’ve only had two occurrences so far.
they sync between my iPad, iPhone, and mac. on my iOS devices i dont see any delete/spam button, only Accept/Decline.
nice snark from the guy:
…news flash dude: any product company makes decisions for its users, from Apple to Google to Dyson. in this case, they have it defaulting to route emailed calendar invites to push alerts to your calendar app. big deal. normally thats a feature, not a bug.
what they need to do here is improve their spam detection, since these invites are emailed to a million random recipients, with some hitting matching real accounts by chance.
This is what I did. But it’s a workaround at best and only for some people. Apple really needs to figure out how to stop it or make addressing it more discoverable. A simple Delete button on the invite would work. You should’t have to search the internet all the time to figure out how to do something on your iPhone.
I got another one, this time on my iPhone, I hit the decline this time and no spam option. I forgot to hit delete or maybe the option wasn’t available this time, not sure, I was busy. If it happens again, and it will because I am not stopping it at this point, I’ll try it again and let you know.