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Comment by brongondwana | Hacker News Reader

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.

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I would be disappointed if I e.g. buy a plane ticket or a ticket to a show and the event is not added to my calendar. (and you never know the email that a show ticket will come from; so I can't add it to my address book)

As an alternative, could you just have it so if I mark an email as spam, any calendar events from it are deleted from my calendar?

Luckily you can turn on "live dangerously" mode if you want - and besides the email arrives straight to your mailbox (unless marked spam) and has a button right there to add it to your calendar.

We think the default is the right balance for most people, and provide easy knobs to adjust the settings if you want.

Right now marking the email spam doesn't find the related calendar events. There's some design work to be done there around user interface when marking emails as spam in bulk (particularly with support for undo and rolling back the calendar changes which isn't as simple as just applying the attached event again, because you may have updated the calendar event since)

For events from spam emails that got updated, it might be worth to investigate if you could ask the user; "You marked an email as spam but an event was imported from it that you updated, Keep/Update/Delete?"

I have the opposite problem. So many times I buy a ticket and there is not a single "add to calendar" button.

I don't even ask for an auto-add. Just a button. But apparently this is one of the most forgotten feature ever.

Either devs don't think about it, or they tested it and it confused the non tech-saavy users so much they decided against it. I can imagine the later very well, though. My mother would click and the setup for a calendar she doesn't have would start, loosing her the process.

Everything old is new again.

From 2012, the first(?) time this was a widespread issue on the web: https://www.theverge.com/2012/6/29/3126837/google-plus-event...

and Google has been enduring calendar spam for years beyong Google+: https://support.google.com/calendar/forum/AAAAd3GaXpE5kUOfyI...

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