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Google Calendar should prevent spam by default
- dbatten 9y agoNot sure if submitting my own blog is discouraged on here, but I'm hoping to get the word out and get this shut down.
- pryelluw 9y agoThis is actually something that has been annoying me for a while. Your solution works and should be implemented. Hope Google listens.
- patorjk 9y agoThank you for posting this. This issue happened to me for the first time last week - I thought my account had been hacked. I had no idea how a rouge spammy event got added to my calendar. I ended up resetting my password and spending over an hour pouring over other aspects of my account to make sure nothing else was compromised. It's mind boggling to think this could have been because of a spam message.
- Raphmedia 9y agoUrgh, this happened to me this week. My calendar somehow got filled with fake hotel reservations.
- kiliancs 9y ago> By default, don't automatically import events from Gmail. If I agree to attend the event, then add it. Not sure about this one. Even without having accepted it I might want to be aware of what's going on. At least in my case I've found it useful in the past. Plus, you are assuming you'll accept the invite from Gmail, but other people might do that from Google Calendar.
- deleted 9y ago[deleted]
- aroundtown 9y ago> I might want to be aware of what's going on. I guess you don't have a problem with other people signing up for services with your email address. I have a <first-initial><middle-initial><last-name>@gmail and several people like to sign up for deliveries and airlines using my email address. I get to know ALL about Richard's flight to Boston, or Rachel's Adult Themed party night, or recently, how Reggie sent $40 worth of flowers to his wife, but $120 to his mistress.
- bartl 9y agoStill, you should add it yourself, and not some overzealous system.
- sachleen 9y agoI've never experienced this as a form of spam myself but I have noticed that some times events will get added to my calendar without me seeing the email message. I'll see something on my calendar and think "I don't remember this..." but if I had just seen it in my inbox, I would have marked it Done and remembered it, even if it was way in the future.
- justincormack 9y agoI like auto adding, but not of spam. I like the way it finds my flights etc, where it doesnt give me a choice. But adding the spam events every day for a yesr is obviously stupid.
- JoshMnem 9y agoThe new design is pretty awful too. Material Design has accessibility problems for people with motion sensitivity. Everything animates, even if you aren't supposed to be looking at it at the time. Sudden movement can cause nausea, especially if there's an initial delay and/or parallax effect. Many people are complaining about it. There needs to be more aesthetic restraint. Animation should be a very thin layer of icing on the cake, not 50% of the cake. "Animation spam" would be an accurate term.
- i1856511 9y agoCould you please provide a source for the anti-Material dialogue from an accessibility perspective? I have been suspicious that this might be the case, with Google and other companies.
- JoshMnem 9y agoI'll try to round up some comments later tonight. I have visual-motion sensitivity, and plan to write some articles on some of the problems with recent animation trends. I'm also planning on creating browser extensions that disable CSS animations and other spammy problems with UI design. It's really difficult for me to use Google's new designs. I switched to Thunderbird/Lightning until I can find a Google Calendar replacement. I removed most apps from my phone and turned off most notifications, because it's too stressful to use it. There needs to be a low-animation setting. Designers should be asking themselves, "how do I make this UI functionality clear with the absolute minimum of animation?"
- beart 9y agoMy biggest complaint with the automatic events has always been the inability to treat them as my own events. If I want to make any changes to the event, I have to copy it to my calendar. Doing so means there are now two versions of the same event, and the one I copied will not automatically update if there is a change. I've seen the automatic events update when, for example, my itinerary changes. I also hate that reminders do not get shared with other events and are google calendar exclusive. This means I can't use a third party calendar app on my phone if I want to use reminders.
- devocracy 9y agoIf they were worried about the underlying problem of merge conflicts, the easiest solution would be the creation of a private notes field for any event shared with you. That way any event updates wouldn't collide with personal notes and you wouldn't need to duplicate events.
- shoover 9y agoUgh. Google Calendar reminders are handled perfectly on Android. You get a notification, and it stays there every time you look at your phone until you clear it. On iOS, even with Google Calendar installed, you get the notification one time (as if for a one-time event) and then it disappears into the app. I assume iOS Reminders work better than this, but I'm dependent on Google Calendar. I have not figured out a workaround for notifications since switching and I am now a less reliable person. Why does the Google Calendar app not manage iOS reminder notifications as it does on Android? Have I horked a notification setting unawares?
- asdfgadsfgasfdg 9y agoGoogle calendar is fairly standards compliant. Just add the calendar to the built in iOS calendar app....
- inetknght 9y agoSo, another complaint about Google Calendar: how do I remove contacts' birthdays from my calendar? I have hundreds of contacts -- almost all are coworkers and almost none of which I care that it's their birthday. Many of their birthdays show up on my Google Calendar. I don't want to remove the showing of birthdays. I want to remove the showing of individual peoples' birthdays.
- rozenmd 9y agoIf you have the Google Calendar app: tap on Settings in the side bar, scroll down to birthdays, tap on your email account and tick "Do not include birthdays"
- giancarlostoro 9y agoThat's all of them OP meant individual ones.
- cosmotron 9y agoIf the person appears in your Google Contacts, are you able to to clear the birthday field?
- inetknght 9y agoI don't want to clear the birthday field from the contact. I just neither want to be notified of it nor see it on my calendar.
- op00to 9y agoI fell victim to this spam, and it was incredibly difficult to get rid of, due to bugs on Google's side. Simply unchecking the box didn't seem to make the invites go away, and I was unable to delete them. Eventually, I used the GCal API to go in and blow everything away. Ugh.
- liquidgecka 9y agoYea.. try having a short (5 character) @ gmail.com address.. For _years_ I have dealt with this issue. Every time I seem to finally get things to not automatically get added I get hit with another round of lazy google engineers that don't add a UI option to disable this silliness. Though, due to the short address I also get hundreds of legit calendar invites that were just sent to the wrong people. I swear I know the whereabouts of half the people in the country with names either starting with, or ending with that combination. =/
- aroundtown 9y agoI have the same problem. I've thought about sending out Christmas Cards to all the random people that have revealed to me a little too much information by not minding their email address.
- liquidgecka 9y agoSomebody misprinted a flier for a local town meeting.. the email was SUPPOSED to be congresman.<myname>@gmail.com but instead it got cut off to just <myname>@gmail.com. I started getting a wave of hate mail asking how I could hate firemen so much! At first I couldn't figure out what was happening but eventually I devised that the town had gone broke (this was 2009) and needed to lay off a bunch of workers, including firemen. A coworker convinced me to try and see what the most outlandish thing I could say and still be believed was. Some of the toppers: 1) I don't know why we need firemen. My has has never even caught fire! 2) My wife cheated on me once with a fireman and now I am getting my revenge! 3) I believe in privatizing fire service, when the need arises the market will find a solution!
- Casseres 9y ago#1 could sound like a challenge to the wrong people. Please be careful. I toohave received emails intended for others. One time I was included ina group email which kept going back and forth and they would not stop emailing me after asking several times. I just started replying with ridiculous answers to the questions and they finally stopped. So I don't blame you, just be careful.
- chuckreynolds 9y agoyup... tweeted about this last week. SUPER annoying and it's fairly frequent recently. https://twitter.com/ChuckReynolds/status/965037661940367360 https://twitter.com/ChuckReynolds/status/965037661940367360
- runlevel1 9y agoApple had a similar problem a little over a year ago: https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2016/11/how-to-stop-the-wave-of-apple-calendar-alert-spam/ https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2016/11/how-t... Anyone known if/how they fixed it?
- saagarjha 9y agoThey've certainly put time into trying to fix it. Whether their spam detection algorithms are good enough to block out invites like these, I have no idea.
- jarcoal 9y agoThis isn't an issue that's exclusive to Google Calendar; Office 365 also does this, as well as numerous other mail+calendar apps. I believe it's related to the iCalendar spec. https://icalendar.org/ https://icalendar.org/
- ickler8 9y agoUnless I'm mistaken, I really don't believe it's an issue with the spec. There's nothing in iCal (RFC 5545) that says you have to take iCal objects attached to emails and automatically include them in the calendar. In fact, iCal servers are simply configured to accept the xml requests and distribute a list of VEVENT objects (among others) for display. They aren't inherently connected to a working inbox. My guess is they have loose rules around auto-adding iCal attachments detected in IMAP/Mime messages. It's notoriously difficult to get email and calendars working. There's a reason ActiveSync is so damn expensive.
- brongondwana 9y agoYeah - At FastMail we default to only adding if it comes from someone in your addressbook. You can reduce it to just an addressbook group, or open to the world if you feel like living dangerously.
- brongondwana 9y agoWow - I spoke on this exact topic at M3AAWG today. We're working on trying to get the email abuse teams and calendar teams at companies working together. As a member of both M3AAWG and CalConnect, it's particularly interesting to me. CalConnect blogged about this last year: https://www.calconnect.org/news/2017/01/30/calendar-spam https://www.calconnect.org/news/2017/01/30/calendar-spam
- mayneack 9y agoI must have less spam email because I really like this feature as it only seems to read things I want events for (hotel visits, flights, etc)
- analogmemory 9y agoI’d assume so the spam calendar invites stopped one day and I had forgotten about that annoying issue
- nikofeyn 9y agoi just wish even gmail would prevent spam. for the past month or so, i have been getting increasing amounts of spam hitting my inbox. i wonder what google is good at anymore besides making their products worse. youtube has been nothing but a study of poor usability design.
- ufmace 9y agoI got one of these for the first time a week or so ago. I don't think the spam was originally spam-filtered. Really crazy that they will let anyone who knows your email address put events on your calendar. Speaking of crazy dumb, the thing that recognizes your flight emails and tells you to go to your flight is nice... for your flight. But it's common at least for me for people coming into town to just forward me their flight emails. Google picks those up and assumes they're my flights, and keeps sending me notifications about getting to "my" flight from somewhere in another state to the city I'm in now. I'm amazed that they haven't put in even a teeny bit of effort to solve that one.
- abraham 9y agoI find it a great feature to get updates on the travel plans of people visiting me.
- tehwebguy 9y agoI just want to be able to scroll normally in month view. Instead it has like a point where it snaps to the next month.
- jageen 9y agoMy suggestion is create petition on change.org :) it seems effective for the case of snapchat :p.
- orionblastar 9y agoI keep getting added to MLM and Pyramid scams, someone just enters my email a few times a week at midnight or 3am so they must be from another time zone. Is there a way to block that user?
- ashtube 9y ago100% agree with this post. I get these spam messages all the time and the worst part is it generates a push notification on my mobile. I see the fix to turn it off, but I rely on the functionality of events being added from my other genuine contacts in my Gmail. It should totally be from contacts on your contact list only.