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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.
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.
screen-shot-2016-11-28-at-6-42-00-pm
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.
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.
Thankfully, I just don't use my iPhone calendar: all that it does is give me reminders about people's birthdays
The problem with this is that you will no longer get legitimate invitations in your calendar. Don't get me wrong, the only other ways are even worse.
Here's the only three solutions I can find.
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.