How do I stop spam iCloud Calendar and Photos invites?

I received icalendar spam from ray ban this afternoon on my iPhone 6+ and iPad Air2-both run IOS 10.1.

Did I ruin my entire life when I declined the message on my iPhone?

By now, everyone reading this has realized that I am a luddite. I do not understand the attempted fixes described by other forum participants.

I need to know the following:

1. What else should I NOT do?

2. How do I prevent the intrusion of unsolicited messages in calendar?

3. How do I configure, disable or remove Calender from my IOS devices?

I am concerned that Apple has become equally as vulnerable to cyber attack as is Microsoft .

Fortunately for me, I am old, patient, and I have books. Shall I clean up my CB radio and purchase US Postage stamps?

Please excuse my unsophisticated techno-verbiage.

Thank you.

If you try to delete the invites, the sender will be notified, which is exactly what people DO NOT want to do.

The only facility that Apple has given us to handle this in a way that does not contact the sender, is to:

1. Create a new calendar (it's temporary, we'll delete it soon), I call mine SPAM
2. Drag the un-accepted invites into this new Calendar (SPAM)
3. Right-click and Delete the Calendar (SPAM)
4. Select "Delete and Don't Notify"

Totally non-intuitive. Good luck out there!

--
Brian

I had a chat with Apple Support this morning. Unfortunately as of now with Photos spam invites your only option is to decline the event according to them. The other option they provide you is that they can enable spam throttling for your Apple ID at their end. I asked them to do that for me. No idea how well it will work but at least it is an option that is available if you contact Apple Support.

At the root of this issue is Apples incredibly naive stance that any action one takes on an invite should solicit an automatic response to the sender. That is exactly what the spammers are preying upon. Either way they are getting a mail letting them know the spammed account is active. And it can be sent more spam in the future.

For apple calendars the "solution" is to delete the calendar once logged in on the web. Once the problem calendar is deleted it can be recreated. The way to figure out which calendar is the problem is to deselect each calendar until the spam events disappear. In my case it was the "home" calendar I wasn't using. I don't consider this a solution because were one using these calendars they lose their invites and events in the process of cleaning up Apples naive omission.

Photos is a different problem because there isn't a way to do this. Accept or decline sends a message to the sender.

So Apple, perhaps its time to have a third option, "delete", that doesn't message the sender with your actions? Or how giving the user the option to not send action receipts at all? Either that or people will just start using google photos or other services. Google has already made it very easy to migrate from photos. And many of us already use google photos as a backup.

This is ridiculous, its been going on for years for some other users, yet apple has failed to offer a delete event without a reply/notify. Spammers are NOT entitled to a reply. For an organization that successfully develops both great software and hardware, this is a huge fail. I've left feedback.

I found a make shift solution to the blocking repeated spamming using my iOS Phone app for Mac use FaceTime app.

Before declining the invitation follow the following steps and let me know if it works well for you.

1: Create a contact call it anything but I call mine "photo spammer".

2: Add spammers email address to above contact.

3: Go to phone app>contacts > "photo spammer"

4: At the bottom select block this caller.

5: Now decline the email.

If you get another email you can always just add them to the same contact. Cheers hope this helps.

Also - if you log in to iCloud, open your Calendar, select Settings (gear at lower-left), choose Preferences, then Advanced ... Set this option as shown, and it will stop automatically dumping these into your calendar.

Same identical invite as yours, same date, similar sender. I followed Eric Root's suggestions mentioned above.

I did not declined neither accepted the invite: it's still there on my calendar. Once Apple will add the "delete without notifying to spammers that my email is actually a real one" button I will delete it.

Update:


The purpose of this reply is to let the group know what has happened since my initial entry. Since then, I have updated both my iPhone 6 plus and my iPad Air 2 to IOS 10.1.1.

I am retired and live on a strict budget. Common sense dictates that technological redundancy is something I cannot afford; therefore, I do not own a pc. The above serve adequately as my home computers. 


1. I have received spam messages to my iCloud calendar. The first was from Rayban and, the second dated 11.25.16, from UGG whatever-that-is.

Both messages appear to have been sent from the same sender. (See message 11.05.16)

I assume that this happened because, due to my own stupidity, I declined the first message which opened my own personal hellgate. 


2. I am not and have not been receiving messages in Photos. I have never set up iCloud Photo Sharing because I do not know what it is and I do not seem to be missing out on anything by not using it. I assume that this is the reason I am not bothered by spam in iCloud Photos..

3. RE: Calendars. I followed the instructions for creating and deleting a Spam Calendar.

4. Then, I changed my iCloud Calendar settings thus:

I had to download Google Chrome to my iPad in order to log on to the desktop version of icloud.com and to follow the directions in the photo below:

Apple doesn’t routinely monitor the discussions. These are mostly user to user discussions.

Send Apple feedback. They won't answer, but at least will know there is a problem or a suggestion for change. If enough people send feedback, it may get the problem/suggested change solved sooner.

Feedback

Apple doesn’t routinely monitor the discussions. These are mostly user to user discussions.

Send Apple feedback. They won't answer, but at least will know there is a problem or a suggestion for change. If enough people send feedback, it may get the problem/suggested change solved sooner.

Feedback

@Merlyneb

Please, follow this thread, there are plenty of advises : page 3 look at the two Brian Brumfield's posts. They are well explained.

Or the daversteam's post just above

And you should also post a feedback to Apple : http://www.apple.com/feedback/ choose iCloud and complete form.

I am sure they are yet working hard on it to offer an anti-spam as useful as the Mail's one ...

People, please leave feedback for Apple at http://www.apple.com/feedback/

They don't react to stuff in here. They react to bad press the flood of complaints and feature requests through the proper channels. Many corporations reason that if you don't have enough initiative to process a feedback/feature request, it must not matter enough. And Apple knows you'll be back for the next iPhone upgrade. Take the initiative.

Don't assume that they will make a smart choice for our behalf. We should be able to do something as simple as DELETING any meeting invite we want, spam or not. NOT EVERY meeting organizer is ENTITLED to a reply. This is not the corporate offices of Apple Corporation where Steve Jobs outlawed deleting calendar invites because some people said they didn't get the invite (and may have secretly deleted the invite) in order to get out of a meeting.

We are not corporate Apple employees. Cease treating us as such.

We demand the option to DELETE a meeting invite without any feedback whatsoever to the meeting organizer.

Please, everyone leave feedback at http://www.apple.com/feedback/

I've given my feedback on this to Apple here: http://www.apple.com/feedback

I trust, as has been mentioned, that if we can all afford the time to post here, we can do the same.

I'm not suggesting that we should stop posting problems and solutions here, since Apple don't like to admit they may have an issue & tarnish their squeaky clean image. We know the reality & we need solutions now, so we have to self medicate.

I'm never disappointed by the altruism demonstrated on the interweb. It's not all cute cats and pratfalls.

😉

Some suggestions in this thread.

Spam Calendar Invites