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Spam Calendar Invites

In just the past week, I have started getting spam in my calendar.


User uploaded file

User uploaded file

Now, I have looked all over the net and most of the previous discussions and how-tos involve preventing calendar items from getting passed from Mail.app to Calendar.app. I do not believe this is happening. I have Mail.app set to not send to Calendar.app. I am not seeing any spam mail in the Inbox of Junk box. It's just coming straight to the Calendar.app.


When my wife sends a calendar event to me, I do not get any sort of email, just the invite in the Inbox of the Calendar.app. So that's how these are coming in. Probably straight from a spammer using a Mac on iCloud.


How do I block these? There doesn't seem to be any way to do so.


Thanks

Andy

MacOS Sierra, Macbook Air Mid 2012, iPhone 6s, iOS 10

Posted on Nov 2, 2016 6:46 AM

Reply
101 replies

Nov 17, 2016 10:37 AM in response to Andrew Mcvinnie

There is a worrying legal development behind all of this chance spam.


Essentially, any action to decline the invitation reveals to the sender that you have an active Apple email address. Therefore this is a confirmation by Apple to reveal personal information, which is actually a breach of the Data Protection Act of law in the U.K. Essentially Apple are breaking the law. To confirm, I have not revealed my email address to anyone to instigate this scam. If you check my post below you can see that several random attempts were made to guess my iCloud email in the calendar invitation. However, my email will only be confirmed should I choose to accept or decline the invitation. Thus, the onus lies upon Apple should I Decline the invitation.

Nov 18, 2016 9:21 PM in response to Andrew Mcvinnie

Same problem here. I spoke to an apple support staff and they said all I can do for now is hide the invite (via putting it in a new calendar and turning offing notifications). For now, she sent the report onto the engineering team apparently. I suggest everyone else with this problem go through the same procedure to encourage Apple to address this issue.

Nov 24, 2016 10:55 AM in response to Andrew Mcvinnie

I found this in: https://9to5mac.com/2016/11/09/icloud-photo-sharing-and-calendar-spam/

I tried it on my calendar. Hopefully this will help.


Cut and pasted from this article's comments:

FlashGen • 13 days ago


There is a slightly easier way to stop the non-email associated spam calendar events showing up. i.e. the ones that just appear in your calendar like magic.

Just log in to iCloud.com open your calendar. Then under the calendars settings (cog icon lower left of the screen), select the Preferences entry and then the Advanced tab. You'll likely notice that your Invitations setting is defaulted to in-app notifications. Change that to email and it'll prevent future invites automatically appear solely in your calendar (you'll get it as an email that is easier to delete without confirming a live account). This has stopped the calendar ones appearing for me…

Unfortunately there isn't an option for this under Photos 😟


Nov 24, 2016 2:09 PM in response to Andrew Mcvinnie

Unfortunately, Apple has not yet addressed this issue. Apple needs to devise a way to stop allowing access to iCloud accounts.

If you choose "accept", "decline", or "maybe", you are actually sending a notice to the perpetrator of the invitation that your account is an active account. (BRILLIANT, APPLE!!) By choosing one of these options, you are opening your account or to more spam.

There is, however, a workaround. Go to calendars. Create a new calendar. Call it "spam", or some other name of your choice. When you receive the invitation, click on the invitation. Change the calendar from whichever calendar it is currently under to your newly created calendar (mine is "spam"). Then simply delete your spam calendar. In this way you have deleted the invitation (which, by the way, is sometimes an all day event for several days). You have also not sent any notification that your account is an active account, and therefore open to more spam. Good luck!

Nov 24, 2016 2:13 PM in response to Andrew Mcvinnie

The workarounds are appreciated but the bottom line is that this is a serious issue and Apple should have known better. How many times do tech companies have to learn this lesson? Anything done automatically on behalf of the user by any software should NEVER be on by default.


I thought we all learned that with Outlook opening attachments automatically many years ago. And Safari opening downloading by default. Apparently not. Calendar should not be sending notifications on your behalf to anyone without first asking if that's okay, no matter what. And if it insists on doing it, it should give the option to send nothing on a case-by-case basis.


Everyone who is as annoyed by this as I am, please go to Apple's feedback page, dig down through macOS apps to Calendar and send your feedback. This should never have happened in the first place.


http://www.apple.com/feedback/

Spam Calendar Invites

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