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Keep Spammers Out of Your Google Calendar
Posted by Adam Pash at 6:00 AM on April 11, 2008
Tech blogger Amit Agarwal has been receiving suspicious, spam-like alerts from his Google Calendar lately reminding him to collect millions from an ATM, among other things. If you've seen similar GCal spam, your first instinct may be that your account has been hacked. On the contrary, clever spammers are taking advantage of a Google Calendar feature that automatically adds events to your calendar as soon as you're invited—which means all a spammer needs to do is send his spam via GCal's Add Guests feature. To fix this, head to your GCal settings and find the entry labelled, "Automatically add invitations to my calendar," then switch from the default (Yes) to "No, only show invitations to which I have responded." Google should probably switch the default to No, but in the meantime, this tweak will do the trick.
Tags: calendars | google calendar | spam
Comments (AU Comments · US Comments)
There are currently no AU comments for this post.
rscotta
Posted 6:38 AM 11/4/08
Vaguely related:
Anyone else using 30boxes? I still like it a lot but it seems like development has completely stalled...
rscotta
diane28177
Posted 6:38 AM 11/4/08
saeedkhourieae..right?
diane28177
diane28177
Posted 6:35 AM 11/4/08
i did that...& mailed u even on that..
diane28177
diane28177
Posted 7:05 AM 11/4/08
thanks
diane28177
diane28177
Posted 7:04 AM 11/4/08
thanks!
diane28177
diane28177
Posted 7:04 AM 11/4/08
i will surely get well versed with ur fav software but need sum time 4 that...till then i think the spam should work..
diane28177
diane28177
Posted 7:28 AM 11/4/08
here i was just unable 2 get...who is speaking what & where were u in it i was unable 2 figure with a lot more technical problems...
diane28177
forpeterssake
Posted 7:26 AM 11/4/08
This strikes me as something Google really should have figured out by now. Anything that can be spammed, will. Here's hoping the switch the default soon. Just changing the default will remove most of the incentive to try calendar spam, which will make enabling the option safer as well.
forpeterssake
cbotwell
Posted 8:14 AM 11/4/08
Mine was set to "no" already. Maybe its fixed? Or maybe I'm just lucky.
cbotwell
TheWeeJenny
Posted 1:29 PM 11/4/08
I changed this setting yesterday and still got new calendar spam today. :/ I marked the alert that came to my email as spam, but it would be even better if there was a way to mark things as spam in the calendar itself.
TheWeeJenny
ficcionista
Posted 8:15 PM 11/4/08
Google Calendar SPAM?!?! Well, I've only changed this setting now, but, to be honest with you all, I've never received any spam on my calendar.
ficcionista
tobybooth
Posted 2:43 AM 12/4/08
This is not really a good fix since it requires the sender of the invitation to choose to send an email. Often times, someone who is creating an event with a large number of invitees will choose not to email the invitation because they themselves don't want to be guilty of spamming. In this scenario, using these setting would cause you to never see the event, and you would never have the opportunity to accept/decline it either.
tobybooth