Spam in Your Calendar? Here’s What to Do

This has been something that we've been aware of as a threat in the industry for a while:

https://www.calconnect.org/news/2019/01/18/calconnect-publis...

I first spoken on a panel about it more than a year earlier than that, along with some people from 1&1 who were very keen to see progress on at least defining the risks!

But it's hard to get attention on fixing things, even in the big players (maybe especially in the big players) until there's user impact.

It's also why, from the very first moment we added this feature in our system, the default in Fastmail has been "only auto-add if it's from somebody in my addressbook". And the "from somebody in my addressbook" test checks for DKIM or SPF alignment.

We also allow turning auto-add off of course, or restricting it only to senders in a particular named addressbook group.

With Google I recently had invites from emails sitting in my spam folder show up in my calendar. You would think that being flagged as spam would be simple to filter on. I actually really value the automatic adding of events to my calendar from legitimate emails, so this was very infuriating as the spam continued to pour in over weeks.

For those that prefer a more visual guide, I've created one here: https://flowshare.io/flow/how-to-block-spam-invitations-from.... It has a screenshot for every step(desktop) and less than 50 words in total.

Unfortunately, the google calendar option doesn't actually reject invitations or really remove them from your calendar, it just hides them for you. If you're sharing your calendar with anybody then they're still visible to them, and as far as I can tell that's unavoidable.

That means if you are sharing you calendar you can't use this option, since it makes it impossible to remove the events that are now spamming everybody else. You have to just manually mark them as spam every time they appear. I get an event like this maybe every other day at the moment, even though they're almost all identical and I've reported them as spam, it's unbelievably annoying. Even more annoying: gmail is actually picking up the invitation email itself as spam, so it's fully aware that it's unwanted, but then it appears in my calendar regardless. Gmail filters to delete them immediately on arrival don't seem to do anything.

I'm right back to the spam dark ages right now, it's terrible.

How hard can it be to _not_ insert 30 events from mails that are clearly in the spam folder already?

This issue is baffling to me. If Gmail knows it's spam why on earth are they inserted. Also why inserting 50 events over 4 days suspicious in the first place i don't know.

A "post mortem" would be interesting - why hasn't this been resolved in a couple of days if the solution is that simple and it affects thousands of users over many months?

I understand this is perhaps the only current solution, but for me this definitely would not work. I actually rely on seeing those un-responded events in my calendar, especially for large group events.

I'd much prefer a "don't show un-responded invites from people you do not know" option.

>the calendar applications from Apple, Google and Microsoft are set by default to accept calendar invites from anyone.

That's insanely dumb.

Why not at least limit calendar invites to contacts or contacts of contacts?

I had one of these show up in my Google Calendar, it was an every-day reoccurring event. I opened the three dot menu on one of the events > Report as spam, and it removed the event and all of its reoccurrences.

I shudder to think how many innocent people will see this and follow through with the scam.

I got a fairly explicit one of these in my calendar the other day, unfortunately it's a calendar I share with my wife, so it appeared on her phone too. That was a fun conversation.

Neither of us could delete the event, either via google calendar or ical. Nor could I find the original email I assume it came from. In the end I just deleted the whole shared calendar.

I was hoping this was about the birthday spam notices in google calendar. There’s no way to delete contact birthday info without deleting the contact.

For some reason Google thinks it’s cool that I’ve emailed “foo@gmail.com” at some point in my life. Foo set their birthday in Gmail and now their birthday shows on my calendar along with people I actually want.

Google says they're working to fix an issue related to this:

From https://support.google.com/calendar/thread/13429505?hl=en :

> We're aware of the spam occurring in Calendar and are working diligently to resolve this issue. We'll post updates to this thread as they become available.

I get this shit all the time, followed a way to disable it on google calendar, unsubscribed from all calendars, uninstalled calendar.app from iphone, and am still getting 'em WTF!

Also mostly russian nonsense

We saw this over the past couple weeks. It freaked me out and google's g suite support was useless. I did report the IAM it looked like these invites came from (to both the cloud fraud form and gsuite support) but maybe that listed IAM is actually google's auto-add-to-calendar bot? I didn't think it made sense to contact cloud enterprise support which tends to have awesome responses.

I was concerned because:

  * we received more sophisticated than usual SPAM/phishing to our employees 'from' one of our partners around the same time
  * we work in politics
  * the timezone on the calendar spam was Russia and multiple staff received the spam invites

Yep, I've been getting Russian events in my google cal that just reappear the day after I report them as spam (which does what?)

Unfortunately, it's pretty inconvenient to just not show calendar events that I haven't accepted. If you have a busy calendar, it can be helpful to prioritize events - some will inevitably be declined or left hanging, but those are useful to see.

It's pretty crazy that calendar invites that are already filtered out to my spam email folder show up in my normal google calendar. Seems like a quick solution for google to go fix.

I have seen this now as a sales tactic, especially with EMC.

They need to let you easily delete events without responding to them. I ended up deleting them without (I think) responding but not until trying two or three different ways which each insisted I had to reply that I wasn’t attending. And now I’m not even sure how I did it and will probably have to cycle through all those attempts again next time.

My problem with this is that I have a russian event every night that only shows up on my phone calendar. I did the fix to remove it from Google calendar through the web, but it's only gone on the web. It still shows up on my phone with no option to delete all.

I've been deleting the next 4 days every 4 days for the last two weeks.

I recently had this problem in an old Samsung phone. The spam was not directly coming from email, but from some other installed app which was somehow tricking S planner (Samsung's calendar app) into adding the events to google's calendar, even though the original spammer app had no calendar permissions.

In my case, I had these spam-invites sent from my G Suite email to my personal Gmail. I could see the emails on the Sent folder.

The weird part is that I had a strong password (1password) + 2-factor on both accounts. I use FF with containers so I only use my email on a container and nowhere else.

I had reviewed all the 3rd party apps and security settings on both accounts and it all looked normal to me. The only issue is that I didn't had the SPF, DMARC and DKIM setup - fixed after it.

I sent email to abuse@google but got no response.

Important detail that Helene mentions in a comment: You should add that that setting in Google Calendar is only available on desktop. I spent a while the other day after getting one of these trying to find the setting on my phone. It’s not there. The setting affects your phone too, just have to use your desktop to change it.

I recently got an iPhone and had this issue for the first time ever, during the first week of usage. It only showed up in the phone-local calendar, so I'm guessing the phone picked it up from some e-mail that Google ignored as spam.

Thank you for posting this. I also had spam showing up in my calendar and feared that my Google account had been hacked. The spam even caused calendar notification sounds to be played in the middle of the night! Worst Default Setting Ever.

I have on occasion thought that this kind of spam should be possible, but never witnessed it, and then, while I was reading this very article, up popped a reminder from Google Calendar about some iPhone that I had allegedly won.

Are these attacks the result of mail programs auto-adding spammy email invites, or of some hacking around with the kinds of features of calendar apps that let you create events with attendees directly?

For spam in google calendar you just turn off the option that is automatically accepting incoming calendar invites.

It's bizarre that Calendar was set up to allow invitations from non-contacts in the first place.

I was hoping this would be about gettinng rid of events such as "Ashura" in my iPhone calendar. Doubtlessly that day is important to a lot of people. But I would prefer to simply have the US legal holidays, without all the other stuff.

Apple are being real dicks about the all-or-nothing nature of these events. Why can't we have some granularity as to the holidays we see in our Calendar?

I'm struggling to invite friends my kid's birthday so that last-minute changes are reflected.

No MUA is clear how they even parse ICS or "text/calendar" URLs.

https://twitter.com/kaihendry/status/1167634464110825473

This should be a standard!

I started receiving these a few weeks ago :( I thought it must have been an exploit somewhere.

I had this the other day, it was not trivial to find this setting to disable.