How to solve iCloud Calendar Spam issue

Apple iCloud users have experienced a surge in Calendar spam – in which spam emails offering cheap designer sunglasses like Ray-Bans, Ugg Boots or Pandora bracelet. These notifications contain calendar invitations to make them even more irritating.

Apple’s operating systems – iOS and MacOS – scan email inboxes for messages that contain calendar invitations so that you don’t have to dig through your emails to find them. When you get an invitation, it pops up as a notification on your phone or tablet.

This is used for meetings, events and so on, and lets you see all your notifications in your calendar app. However, it is also being increasingly exploited by spammers offering cheap deals. While spam emails can easily be ignored, or blocked by junk filters, calendar invitations are more visible.

Often invites are sent to different email addresses in bulk. It is not clear why there has been such a rise in these spam calendar notifications. It may be linked to Black Friday, or recent data breaches that have seen hackers steal millions of email addresses.

How to solve the issue

There have been some solutions posted like this one here on YMOZ utilizing a MobileSync service from a software company.

However, it appears to be fairly widespread, with hundreds of online complaints. The events often run for several days, clogging up calendars.

Many users took to Twitter to express their frustrations.

@SmartyPanda It’s ridiculous. And the silence from @AppleSupport speaks volumes about how “serious” they are taking the #iCalSpam problem.

— Dino (@cfrangos) November 26, 2016

iCal spam now? These people are animals. A 7 day meeting to buy NFL jerseys for $15 seems like overkill. Two days max. #icalspam

— Michael Kehoe (@kehoemic) November 29, 2016