Get rid of that Calendar SPAM! Here’s 4 tips to help you out!

 

 

4 Tips to get rid of Spam Calendar Invites

So lets go back three weeks ago. We were minding our own business, using our iPhones like any other day and noticed a daily, all-day recurring calendar invitation. We thought this odd and thought it was a one-off by a spammer adding an event file to an email. We received a few more over the next couple of weeks and realized that our emails didn’t contain the invitations.

We recoiled in horror and realised that spammers were sending them straight from the Calendar!

Spam is annoying. In our minds, it is up there with bad popup windows that either has close buttons that don’t work or are hidden or the related content balcony at the bottom of websites.

Below is a list of four tips that will help you prevent further calendar spam invites, delete and hide the invitations and the last tip deals with giving you 100% control over your calendar. Also, did you know you can turn your iOS keyboard into a trackpad?

1. Update your iCloud.com Calendar settings

Be default, every time you get a calendar invite, Apple is going to load it automatically into your calendar. Changing this setting will force the invite to go to your email account which your junk filters should be able to remove. You’ll need to sign into iCloud.com for this to work.

• 1. Goto the Calendar App
• 2. Click the cog in the bottom right corner
• 3. Goto Advanced
• 4. Under Invitations, select “email to whatever your email is”

2. Delete spam invitations without notifying the Spammer

Now there are two ways of doing this. You can outright delete the event on your desktop but this will notify the spammer that you actually exist. If you’re already done this, then you can delete away since you’ve been marked BUT if you haven’t, below a “stealthy” way to keep your calendar clean.

This method will allow you to bulk delete all the spam invitations once you’ve reassigned them to a temporary calendar. Removing the invitations through this process doesn’t result in a prompt explaining that the spammer is going to be notified.

We’d suggest doing this on your iOS device as it works much quicker than on the desktop app or through iCloud.com.

• 1. Press “Calendars”
• 2. Press “Edit”
• 3. Add Calendar on your iCloud account

• Call it Spam (or whatever you like)
• Goto the Spam Invitation
• Change the Calendar of the Spam Invitation to the calendar created in Step #4

• Go back to “Calendars”. Select calendar created in Step #4
• Scroll to the bottom and press “Delete Calendar”

No more spam calendar event!

This will remove all the spam invitations and there isn’t a notification indicating that the event coordinator will be notifiied.
 

 

3. Hide your declined Spam invitations

If you’ve been declining the invitations (bad move!) and you don’t want to deal with Tip #2, you can easily hide all your rejected event. We fall into this category as we tried to figure out how to remove the annoying things taking up all our calendar space.

• 1.Goto your Calendar App
• 2. Goto the bottom of the App and press “Calendar”
• 3. Scroll to the bottom and toggle off “Show Declined Events”

4. Take full control of your Calendar

If you want total control over your Calendar, you can remove the ability for iOS to try to pull invitations from other Apps.

• 1. Goto the Settings App
• 2. Scroll down to Calendar
• 3. Toggle off “Events found in Apps”

By doing that, nothing is going to be getting into your Calendar unless you put it there.