Apple Introduces 'Report Junk' Option To Deal With iCloud Calendar Spam Invites (9to5mac.com)

Apple is rolling out a fix for the iCloud Calendar spam issue that has plagued users over the past few weeks. On iCloud.com, reports 9to5Mac, the company has added a new Report Junk feature. This lets users remove spammy invites from their calendar and reports the sender to Apple for further investigation. From the report: The feature is currently only available on Apple's iCloud.com Calendar web app but it is likely to roll out to the iOS and Mac native Calendar in a future software update. Since early November, some Apple users were seeing a deluge of calendar invites from unsolicited people (usually with Chinese names) that used the description field of calendar invites to 'advertise' junkware and various physical products.

Comments

how about just a delete

[fermion]

My problem is that I can only accept or reject a Calendar request. There should be an option to simply delete it without notifying the spammer.

Re:Unacceptable for professional use

[worf_mo]

Unless you give the provider a whitelist of allowed addresses (or domains), they might have a hard time filtering all calendar spam. Are your company's Outlook servers run by your IT department or are you using an external provider? Outlook calendars don't seem* to be much different from iCloud calendars: anyone can send you an invitation unless the message containing the invitation gets caught by the mail spam filters.

* I don't have much experience with Outlook - one of my customers runs Outlook servers, and they accept calendar invitations from any sender.

Re:Why wont they do this with Phone calls?

[Just Some Guy]

They do. Or more to the point, they provide an API so that third party apps can, and in a privacy-preserving manner:

• - Caller ID apps can fetch or generate lists of spam numbers and publish them to the phone's internal storage. It also set options for how to handle different kinds of unwanted calls (spam, fraud, etc.).
• - When someone calls, your phone checks against that pre-stored list to categorize the caller. If it's a hit, the phone uses the settings from the previous step to either flag the caller so that you see a warning sign or block the call altogether.

With that design, the apps don't get access to your callers so they can't spy on you. It's the best kind of trust model: the one where you don't have to trust them. I like the Hiya app but there are others.