Apple investigating iCloud Calendar spam solution
Apple on Wednesday released a statement regarding a recent spate of spam iCloud Calendar invitations, saying it is working to address the issue by identifying and blocking suspicious invite senders.
Apple acknowledged the issue, which became a problem for many iCloud users in recent weeks, in a brief statement to iMore's Rene Ritchie, who subsequently shared the response via Twitter.
"We are sorry that some of our users are receiving spam calendar invitations. We are actively working to address this issue by identifying and blocking suspicious senders and spam in the invites being sent," Apple said.
The company failed to detail how, exactly, it plans to target offending users.
Over the past week, spammers have increasingly turned to Apple's Calendar service instead of sending advertisements and other promotional content through email, effectively bypassing potential spam filters. Depending on system settings, iCloud Calendar invites are pushed out directly to connected iOS and Mac devices, which in turn trigger an onscreen notification that must be accepted or denied.
Further, interacting with an iCloud Calendar invite automatically sends a response to the sender, meaning spammers can easily determine whether a particular account is active.
An innocuous problem compared to malicious data breaches and hardware hacks, iCloud Calendar spam has nevertheless become a thorn in the side of Apple device owners used to a spam-free experience.
While Apple works on a backend solution users can manually redirect Calendar invites to Mail instead of the Calendar app. To change this setting, users must sign in to iCloud.com on a Mac or PC, navigate to the Calendar web interface and click on Settings, represented as a small gear icon at the bottom left of the screen. Select Preferences > Advanced, navigate to Invitations and choose Email to [email address]. This method will deactivate push notifications for all Calendar invitations, including legitimate requests.
Alternatively, users can simply turn off Calendar notifications on their iOS device by navigating to Notifications > Calendar in the Settings app. The settings pane includes options for switching off notifications for incoming invites or all Calendar events.
Users who want to rid their calendar of spam invites without alerting spammers have to undertake the arduous process of creating a dedicated spam calendar, adding all spam invites to said calendar, then deleting it.
Apple acknowledged the issue, which became a problem for many iCloud users in recent weeks, in a brief statement to iMore's Rene Ritchie, who subsequently shared the response via Twitter.
"We are sorry that some of our users are receiving spam calendar invitations. We are actively working to address this issue by identifying and blocking suspicious senders and spam in the invites being sent," Apple said.
The company failed to detail how, exactly, it plans to target offending users.
Over the past week, spammers have increasingly turned to Apple's Calendar service instead of sending advertisements and other promotional content through email, effectively bypassing potential spam filters. Depending on system settings, iCloud Calendar invites are pushed out directly to connected iOS and Mac devices, which in turn trigger an onscreen notification that must be accepted or denied.
Further, interacting with an iCloud Calendar invite automatically sends a response to the sender, meaning spammers can easily determine whether a particular account is active.
An innocuous problem compared to malicious data breaches and hardware hacks, iCloud Calendar spam has nevertheless become a thorn in the side of Apple device owners used to a spam-free experience.
While Apple works on a backend solution users can manually redirect Calendar invites to Mail instead of the Calendar app. To change this setting, users must sign in to iCloud.com on a Mac or PC, navigate to the Calendar web interface and click on Settings, represented as a small gear icon at the bottom left of the screen. Select Preferences > Advanced, navigate to Invitations and choose Email to [email address]. This method will deactivate push notifications for all Calendar invitations, including legitimate requests.
Alternatively, users can simply turn off Calendar notifications on their iOS device by navigating to Notifications > Calendar in the Settings app. The settings pane includes options for switching off notifications for incoming invites or all Calendar events.
Users who want to rid their calendar of spam invites without alerting spammers have to undertake the arduous process of creating a dedicated spam calendar, adding all spam invites to said calendar, then deleting it.
Comments
Damn, at least give them more than 5 minutes before declaring that they've failed? Didn't this just start happening a few weeks ago? Maybe 'did not' instead of 'failed to'?
Apple needs to put all the preferences that are available on icloud.com available in the iOS settings app.
Rant over.
I had three around Black Friday, but since I directed them to eMail, I haven't seen one, so I guess
one or more of the 295 Rules I've set (usually pointlessly) might be working, deleting them
before I see them...maybe? It's nice Apple is looking at it, but it doesn't seem good that it could
have happened in the first place, and it really sucks that you appear to need a Mac to address it...
(I couldn't find a way around it on my iPhone, but, that's normal
I also hope that whatever Apple is working on also takes care of the spam photo sharing invites that show up in Photos. Much less common but that's out there, too.
youl see this has been an issue for some years now, bout time it got a simple fix.
Seems to me that a better solution would be to:
create an an option that would only allow invitations from people in your address book
create an option that would only allow invitations from people you've replied to before
and, the most obvious one, allow people to delete invitations without sending back a response.
People complained about this on Apple Communities back in 2012: https://discussions.apple.com/thread/3705591?tstart=0