In this comprehensive guide, you’re going to learn exactly how to prevent spammers from invading your Google calendar in 2021.
This could pose a major threat to your personal data and information, and even to the entire security of your Google account and other associated accounts.
And I’m going to show you how to prevent all these in these simple steps;
Let’s dive right in!
Google Calendar Spamming – (A Quick Analogy)
Melissa, a 25 years old event planner, basically lives her life day-to-day by her Google calendar; every event and schedule are well dated and planned out on her calendar.
She suddenly starts to see invites to things she never added herself to, she even gets an invite saying she won an iPhone 12 only for her to find out it is spam!
Not only is this irritating and annoying, but it caused problems with her work as she decides to ignore all invites like this and in turn, ended up missing a very important event because of this decision. This scenario might not seem like something that could happen to you, but, it could happen to anyone who uses Google calendar.
If you type in Google calendar, you will see a long list of complaints from people even on Twitter having their Google calendar spammed with unwanted events.
Must Read: How to Personalize your Google Calendar…
It makes so much sense because, due to the global pandemic Covid-19 that basically made every individual, business or company resolve to work online, which in turn has made almost everyone familiar with the Google calendar or the countless options like it.
Most people might even live their entire week, month or yearly activities planned out on their Google calendar. And as helpful and time saving as this has proven itself to be, it is not without the problems that come with it. This is why it is most important that you learn how to prevent spammers from invading your Google calendar.
If you can’t already tell, today we would be tackling the biggest problem it is faced with; the calendar Spam.
What Does it Mean to Spam?
As if spam in your email inbox isn’t bad enough, they have started invading people’s Google Calendar and by using Gmail messages as a trigger invitation into Google Calendar, spammers are taking advantage of the connection between Gmail addresses and Google calendar to send users fraudulent invitations and this mostly includes messages from malicious links.
Spammers invading innocent Google calendar users has been on for years and isn’t so recent, however, in recent weeks there have been reoccurring complaints of scams involving Google calendar. And this is simply because, by default, Google Calendar automatically add events once you receive an invitation even if you never clicked on the Accept button.
As long as it is possible for a person to send invitations to them, they can sneakily insert information to google calendar. Fake links would still find their way into Google Calendar even when the person carefully declines events that they seemingly don’t know or want, the calendar would still show the events declined. This is a result of the mutation of Gmail into Google Calendars.
What is this calendar spam you might wonder?
In the simplest term, calendar spamming is basically the new mutation of a decade-old problem, email spamming.
They work basically the same way; spammers basically use suspicious and dubious links to add up people’s email addresses to a calendar invite list. And once that is done, they basically add up any number of events to innocent people’s calendar and without their permission.
Now I know this doesn’t sound like such a big deal and it seems easy enough to avoid, well think again, scammers basically insert malicious software in between what might be legit calendar invites and do it becomes almost impossible to differentiate between what you are looking for and spammers if you don’t know exactly what you’re looking for. It doesn’t matter how these spammers get a hold of people’s email addresses and it is unknown but the problem is once they do an individual’s calendar becomes a complete mess.
This is why it is very important to learn how to prevent spammers from invading your Google calendar.
How to Prevent Spammers from Invading Your Google Calendar
Yes, spams have in recent times basically taken over Google calendar but there are ways to prevent receiving it even though it is absolutely difficult to get rid of it completely. Follow the below steps if you’re looking to learn how to prevent spammers from invading your Google calendar:
- Simply go to Calendar.Google.com. and open Google Calendar
- Tap the settings cog on the top-right of the page and select Settings.
- Choose Event Settings.
- Change the option that says “Automatically add invitations” from Yes to No, only show invitations to which I have responded.
- Now scroll down the page to the section titled View Options and uncheck the box that says Show declined events. This prevents Google Calendar from showing spam that you’ve declined.
If you use Google Calendar on your phone, double-check the settings inside the app to make sure that the changes have been applied.
