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It's Not Just You, iCloud Calendar Spam is On the Rise (techcrunch.com)
New submitter petersike writes: If you're using iCloud to sync your calendar across your devices, chances are you just received a bunch of spammy invites over the last few days. Many users are reporting fake events about Black Friday 'deals' coming from Chinese users. If you're looking for cheap Ray-Ban or Louis Vuitton knockoffs, you might find these invites useful. Otherwise, you might be wondering: why is this a thing? If you use your calendar for work, you already rely on calendar invites to invite other people to meetings and events. All major calendar backends support this feature -- Google Calendar, Microsoft Exchange and Apple's iCloud. And it's quite a convenient feature as you only need to enter an email address to send these invitations. You don't need to be in the same company or even in your recipient's address book. But it's also yet another inbox -- and like every inbox out there, it can get abused.
Feeling cranky today but I really wish ALL of this nonsense with calendar invites would stop. People are forever 'inviting' me to meetings that I don't have to go to. Typically when I'm supposed to be doing something else. It seems that whoever designed at least iCal made no allowance for the fact that I'm not available to everyone all of the time. I have work to do. Have you meetings but leave me out of your twisted plans.
Now go away or I shall taunt you a second time.
Faster! Faster! Faster would be better!
Problem is, if looking for a job, people want to shoot you invites for stuff, no invites, no interview.
Of course iOS replies to the sender no matter what if you accept/tentative/decline an invite, so spammers love the system, as they can figure out valid addresses to sell. However, it is worth it, to have an OS that is as malware resistant as iOS has been.
Log into your iCloud account via a computer browser, iOS safari will not work, go to settings and select the option that allows calendar invites to be sent to email rather than directly to the iDevice. Doing this will send the invite to your email inbox which will then get trapped by the spam filter. Boom no more calendar spam.
Surprised a summary of solutions wasn't included in the article summary. Solution #4 is the turn-it-off! solution the turn-it-off! guy is looking for.
From the site:
Option #1: If you don’t use iCloud for your calendar, open the Settings app on your iPhone and System Preferences on your Mac. Head over to iCloud settings and disable calendars to stop iCloud syncing and event invitations.
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Option #2: If you want to quickly get rid of the spam, just decline the calendar invite. The good thing is that the event will just disappear from your calendar. If it’s still there, make sure you disabled “Show Declined Events” in your calendar app settings. The bad thing is that the spammer will receive a notification, proving that you viewed the notification, you use your calendar and your iCloud email address is valid.
Option #3: Create a new iCloud calendar, move your spam events to this new calendar and delete the calendar. Make sure you press “Delete and Don’t Notify” when you get a prompt. This way, the spammer won’t know that you saw the notification and that this iCloud email address is valid.
Option #4: Go to iCloud.com on your laptop and open the Calendar web app. Click on the gear icon and open Preferences. In the Advanced tab, you can choose to receive calendar invites as emails. The good thing is that your email client could catch the spam before it shows up in your inbox. And emails are less intrusive than calendar alerts anyway. The bad thing is that you won’t receive any push notification for new calendar events, even genuine ones.
Log in to icloud through the web browser.
Go to the Calendar app
Once in, click the settings cog on left bottom corner
Click on preferences
In advanced at the very bottom select the email invites radio instead of the invites go to app radio
Done.
How do they even make an embedded app for a device that requires you log in from a device that isn't even using the same OS in order to change a setting?
Most twits who abuse calendar functions like that in a work setting use a calendar to 'perceive' doing work as opposed to actually 'doing' work. See that very crap you described all the time anymore.
This only started happening to me when I jailbroke my older iPhone 5S, then immediately the invite spam started. So this is one vector that information may be gathered.
I contacted Apple on a couple occasions. First, they acknowledged that it wasn't just me - they were "working on it". The second time I called, explained what was going on, I was placed on hold and the rep disconnected the call. I take this as an indicator they are getting overwhelmed with complaints and just don't want to hear about it anymore.
So be careful if you're jailbreaking your phone. Consider the source of who actually wrote the code -- very few of us pull down and reverse-engineer this stuff (if we even could) but I'm willing to bet there are other sneaky tricks left in there to steal other information, it would not surprise me one bit.
Thankfully, I just don't use my iPhone calendar: all that it does is give me reminders about people's birthdays
I don't understand why these invites don't have a silent decline option.
It also seems like someone should have to have previously sent you an email that you've responded to to be able to send you an invite. Otherwise it's just a breach of netiquette. After all, a calendar is not in itself a communications medium but rather a medium for arranging communications.
I'm amazed that they think that these are the only major 'platforms'. Maybe if you don't have a real job everybody you communicate with is on Gmail. But seriously? Even that isn't true. Yahoo! at a minimum makes up a significant percentage still and there are a heck of a lot of people with company provided email addresses on other systems.
Networks not accepting incoming Internet connections initiating from China, *and* forums that exclude India...
I don't want random calendar invites even from people who work at my company. I should be permitting them, not having the system automatically spam me with crap. Block feature is not necessary with opt-in, as you are blocked by default.
The crappy thing is, if they just spam addresses and numbers they get responses if you accept or decline. Options are pretty limited.
One more "good idea on paper, but sucks in implementation and practice" to chalk up to the talking heads in Marketing.
-The wise argue that there are few absolutes, the fool argues that there are no probabilities.