first calendar now photos invitation spam

I use photo sharing with my family, if I turn it off, will I lose all that stuff permanently?

So the events came back in my calendar again! I went into settings and turned off calendar for each of my linked email accounts on my phone. Got rid of them, for now. No idea what to do about the photo sharing without losing my family stuff :-(

Apple MUST come up with some kind of mechanism for blocking users or an option to disable invitations.

Ok

But why are you telling other users - if Apple must do this you need to tell them - http://www.apple.com/feedback/

LN

OK, having spoken to Apple -

DO NOT DO WORKAROUNDS
DO NOT DECLINE THE INVITES

This isn't fixing the problem, it's extending it and limiting the functionality of the programs.

CALL APPLE - they have a tech team on the case and can open up a case number. What you'll need to do is screen share with an operator, show the events and screen shot the email addresses they're coming from. You'll be a provided with a link to upload the screenshots so they can note the senders and email addresses.

They will BLOCK those addresses from there.

THEY ARE WORKING ON IT - posting on here does show the extent of the problem, but only by taking time out of your day and alerting them via Apple chat or by phone will anything get done. Hopefully this will mean a patch in a future update to ensure that this can be fixed properly without workarounds.

Is it a pain to go through all of the above? Certainly. But it's the only way to work towards getting a proper fix.

Hope all of the above is helpful.

Marc

I just did this on Mac (10.12). Open Calendars and in the left sidebar, right click and select new calendar and name it Junk. If the sidebar is not visible, click Calendars button at the top of the window.

Now, find the rogue invite and select Get Info. In the top Right corner will be a drop down to associate the event with one of your calendars. Choose Junk.

Then, right click the Junk calendar and select Delete and then Delete when the confirmation dialog appears. If there are events in this calendar, it will also ask if you want to permanently remove the items or merge them, choose permanently delete.

On iOS, open Calendars, Tap on the Calendars link at the bottom of the screen, Tap Edit, Tap Add Calendar and call it junk. Then, find the invite and associate it with the Junk Calendar, then repeat above but remove the Junk calendar and respond delete to the confirmation prompts.

Well, this isn't really a solution, as it means you can't then share photos or calendars/events with your friends/family.

Today I rebased my OS X Mail database by removing all files at ~/Library/Mail/V3/MailData having an "Envelope Index" prefix. This does not change anything with the actual problem but for me it helped to remove the red notification circle (only) at OS X Photos icon. I found this to be very annoying as I have Photos in my dock.

If you want to do this you need to

1. quit Mail
2. go to Finder, click Go to and select Go to folder...
3. copy and paste ~/Library/Mail/V3/MailData into it
4. click Go to be presented various files including those with the "Envelope Index" prefix
5. move those "Envelope Index" files to a safe place before you finely delete them in case something goes wrong
6. restart Mail, you will be presented a window telling you Mail will be recreating the database. Depending on your amount of mail and hardware performance this might tage a minute or two

In case anything goes wrong

1. quit Mail
2. remove newly created "Envelope Index" files at ~/Library/Mail/V3/MailData it present
3. finally move back the "Envelope Index" files from your safe place to ~/Library/Mail/V3/MailData.

Hope that Helps

You are obviously not reading what people are saying. They are not coming via e-mail. Any idiot knows to delete an e-mail. These are events that are showing up on our calendars, that WE did not put there. The only option it gives is to decline, accept, or maybe. If you decline, they know it's a working account and will continue to bombard you until your calendar has spam, filling the whole day, on every day of the month.

A temporary workaround is to go into calendars, click edit, then click add new calendar, create a new calendar and name it SPAM. Then go to the event invite, and click on the name of the calendar that the event was sent to (example: Home), now choose the SPAM calendar instead, and it will move it to that folder. Then go back into Edit, and delete that Spam folder. The calendar event will now disappear.

You can also go into Icloud.com from a laptop/desktop, and click on calendars, then settings, then advanced. Check the option to have event invites sent to your e-mail instead. Then, you can easily delete the e-mail without replying, or just report it as spam.

I have spent hours on the phone with Apple for the last 2 days, talking to supervisors in the tech department. They said they were going to forward the info on to the engineers. They told me to call back in a few days and tell them if it was still happening.

P.S. They did not know about the workaround, I found that on my own. They also didn't know about changing your Icloud settings to send invites to your e-mail either. I found that myself, online. They have no clue that these are related somehow to Icloud.

Also, if you click on calendars and look at the list of calendars, such as "Home, Work,& Calendar"...if you click the little "I" for info on the right, then where it says "Shared with", click "Add person"...and you will see the actual e-mail addresses of the people sending these invites to you. They have shared access to all of your calendars, even if you create a brand new one.

Apple is going to have to create an option/security setting where you can choose to NOT allow anyone to access your calendars, unless you specifically send them an invite! Strangers should not be allowed to access your calendars by simply knowing your e-mail address!

IIt's definitely spam. They leave the list their sending to visible. There are 15 other addressees with addresses almost--but not quite--mine. Sender is Chinese.

Can you do this on iPhone or mac only? Can't see any add calendar options on iPhone.

It worked. That's it. Looks like this is the solution. Thanks.

Thank you for that easy to follow explanation. I got a notification late last night and thought it was strange. I look in my calendar and there was 6 or 7 invites starting from 24 November going into next week.

Allow me to shake your hand, and can I have your autograph? LOL. You are one smart cookie- you actually take the time to READ and listen - from one human to another, I really appreciate all of your work on this and sharing it with us. Thanks!

Thank you for the tips and summary. Routing the invitations to email where they can be dealt with as spam is an acceptable temporary fix for me... though limiting invitations to contacts seems like a common sense choice for Apple to provide. The "spam calendar" trick allowed me to get rid of existing invitations. I would like to add that, if you access the iCloud site from a Mac, under the main settings, there is an option to check apps that can provide your name to other people who have your email address... even without responding to an invitation. It might be worth everyone checking to make sure that they don't have any of those enabled.