The ongoing problem of spam invitations in Apple’s Calendar app finally has a fix, at least on iCloud. Users can now report invitations as junk with the click of a button, but they need to log into Apple’s iCloud web interface, which limits the fix to desktop and laptop users for now.
Spam event invitations have been an issue for a while, but a recent dramatic upswing made the problem a higher priority for Apple. Spammers take advantage of a Mac and iOS feature that automatically adds emailed invitations to Calendar, and accepting or declining the invitation confirms your email address as legit to spammers.
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Apple’s fix for now is a Report Junk button that shows up with Calendar invitations from anyone who isn’t in your Contacts list. Clicking the button reports the sender to Apple and removes the invitation without sending a confirmation.
That’s great for Mac users who routinely access their schedule from the iCloud web interface, but isn’t very helpful for anyone using the Calendar app—or any other scheduling app that accesses Calendar’s database. iOS users are left without any real fix right now because logging into iCloud in Mobile Safari shows a dialog directing you to the iOS-native Calendar and Contacts apps.
Apple said it was working on a way to identify and block spam event invitations. This is likely just the first step and hopefully we’ll see the Report Junk feature in the macOS and iOS-native versions of Calendar soon.
If you prefer to handle spam invitations in the Calendar app be sure to check out Bryan Chaffin’s how-to on deleting the events without notifying the sender.
[Thanks to 9to5 Mac for the heads up]
Just remove the feature, it is a busy body Facebook type of thing. Let us manually, one-click, add to the Calender.