How to Prevent Spammers From Entering Your Google Calendar
My boyfriend and I have a shared Google calendar, so we can keep track of each other’s various activities and commitments, as well as things like concerts and parties that we plan to attend together. It’s a great system for us, but this week we found something strange on the calendar: “You won an iPhone X in the AppleStore.”
The event was added from my boyfriend’s Gmail account; however, he says he has never seen the “event” email. It is also on our calendar five times.
A quick Google search reveals that calendar spam appears to be on the way. Spammers have figured out how to infiltrate the most sacred of places, our calendars promising free iPhones and losing £ 50 in 2 weeks.
Hack takes advantage of the Google Calendar feature, which automatically adds events to which you are invited by email to your calendar, even if you have not replied to them (or they do not offer such an option). To be honest, this is a feature that I love. It automatically adds flight information, which is great,
But like most good things, the counterfeit iPhone seller messed it up for all of us.
On this week’s How to Geek wrote explaining how to prevent automatically adding invitations to the calendar to your calendar. When you do, you will completely lose this feature, not just block spammers. However, if you receive spam, this might be the right call.
Here’s how to turn off the automatic addition of invitations to your calendar:
- Go to the Settings menu by clicking the gear icon in the upper right corner of the calendar page and choosing Settings from the drop-down menu.
- Select Event Settings from the left sidebar.
- Click the “Automatically add invitations” arrow.
- From the drop-down menu, select “No, only show invitations to which I have replied.”
You can also prevent him from adding events from Gmail by going to the settings menu and then:
- Select Events from Gmail from the left sidebar.
- Uncheck the box next to Automatically add events from Gmail to my calendar.
Again, this is all or nothing, so if you like this feature, you can postpone changing your settings until calendar spam becomes a problem.
That said, if calendar spam is already giving you a headache, this can be a quick and easy way to fix it.