SPAM in Calendar Inbox

Question

Created Nov ’16

Replies 4

Boosts 0

Participants 2

I received a SPAM calendar invite yesterday, never seen anything like this before and was dismayed that I was unable to delete the invite without declining the meeting. The invite was obviously spam for sunglasses. I did some research and found quite a few people having the same problem but only with the most recent iOS 10.11. There appear to be some work arounds but I'm not sure if they are all 100% effective. The calendar invites also don't appear to be attached to an email, they look like they're coming from the iCloud calendar. There are people also having similar issues with spam photo sharing invites and spam reminders, all again with NO way to simply delete the invite without declining, because once you decline you send a message back confirming your email address.

I looked on the beta forums but didn't see any mention of a fix in the pipeline for this, has anybody else had a similar experience? Is there a known fix for this behavior?

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Answer 1

TheCD OP

Nov ’16

Since this is a user-centric problem, it might be more helpful to post in the Apple Support Communities https://discussions.apple.com/.

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Answer 2

COB OP

Nov ’16

I don't think this is a user specific issue at all. Either something changed in recent builds of iOS 10 to allow this type of spam to slip through the cracks or spammers have found a way to bypass email spam filters by sending out caldev / ical invites. Also, by not allowing a meeting or event to be deleted WITHOUT notifying the event creator should be addressed.

I've also filed a bug report that addresses the inability to simply delete an event invitation without sending notification. I understand that this functionality is NOT desirable in a business environment but I think a greater percentage of iDevice / Mac users are not using their device in a corporate environment. Even if this is a Calendar setting that can be locked down, it would be extremely beneficial, especially if spammers have found a new way to harrass users.

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Answer 3

TheCD OP

Nov ’16

When I said "user-centric", I meant "not app developer-specific." This forum is mostly developer-to-developer (although Apple employees occasionally do post). Unfortunately, as app developers, there's absolutely nothing we can do about this problem.

On the other hand, it is good you filed a bug report. It's the only way to officially let Apple know about a problem. Now that they know, they might fix it.

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Answer 4

COB OP

Nov ’16

I find that the quality of responses I get from the developer community is usually far superior to the responses on the public forums...

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