Google Calendar spam & the measures Google has to tackle it – e-Why, What & How

Spammers have now found a new way to trick your Google Calendar into adding spammy events into your schedule without your consent. Google announced recently that it was aware of the Google Calendar spam & was currently working on a fix.

While spam emails have always been the main strategy of spammers who send you fake promo mails or the popular “African prince” scam emails, Google’s anti-spam algorithm has done a good job at filtering out these emails & keeping them out of your Inbox. However, spammers have now found a back door to your mail by taking advantage of a new feature in, of all the things, Google Calendar.

A recently added to Google Calendar was the automatic “picking up” of events you have been invited to & adding them to your calendar. While this feature is very useful as it helps to keep invites from getting buried among loads of other mails, the problem is that it lacks the same types of filter that keeps spam away from your Inbox. Thus, if a spam bot sends a fake event invite to you, your calendar adds it in automatically.

User schedules have been filling up with spammy invites like “Cheap Raybans here” or “Win a free iPhone” & some such.

Google acknowledged these issues 1st with a pinned post on Google Calendar’s support forum, & stated that it is working on how resolving the issue as soon as possible.

Before a full fix arrives, users can disallow their calendar from picking up this spammy invites by disabling the feature which automatically adds events to your calendar.

Here’s how

Open Google Calendar
Go to the “settings” page
From the left, select “Event Settings”
Find the “Automatically Add Invitations” button &
Change this setting to “No, only show invitations to which I have responded”

You can also remove the spam invites in batches. To do this, open Google Calendar on your PC & click on any of the spam events. Click on the options button (the three dots at the top right of the pop up) then report the invite as spam to have it removed. Avoid clicking on the URLs in any of these invites as it can open you up to phishing attacks, malicious ads & so on.

Image Credit: https://pixabay.com/users/geralt-9301/