Hello All, A member on the V iPhone list kindly provided a link to an article that was published in the New York Times, regarding this iCalendar Spam problem.
I will paste it in, here, for your reference. Mark Fighting iOS Calendar Spam November 25, 2016 Tech Tip By J. D. BIERSDORFER Question: I have been getting spam invitations to my iOS calendar recently. They come from Chinese accounts and their subjects are for super-discounted Ray-Bans and the like. Is there any solution to this? Answer: Many iCloud users have recently reported an influx of spam in the form of iOS calendar events and iCloud Photo Sharing invitations. While the delivery mechanism is different, the calendar and photo-sharing invitations traffic in the same old suspect offers for cheap goods as the junk mail and text messages that came before. Unlike those older forms of spam, which can be filtered, blocked or deleted, invitation spam usually offers Accept, Decline (or Maybe) as your options — all of which notify the spammer that your account is live and ready for more unsolicited offers. While an Ignore button is currently not available so you can quietly bury these unwanted invitations, dedicated users have come up with least two workarounds for the calendar garbage. (For the junk photo-sharing offers, turning off the iCloud Photo Sharing feature in your iOS Photos & Camera or iCloud settings seems to be the only avoidance option at the moment.) To ditch calendar spam you have already received, open the Calendar app, tap the Calendars button at the bottom of the screen and then tap the Edit button. On the next screen, select the Add Calendars option and give the new calendar a name like Spam, Junk or something therapeutically snarky. Tap the Done button at the top of the screen a few times until you arrive back on the Calendar screen. Select the spam invitation and move it to the new calendar you just made, and then repeat the steps for all the unwanted invitations. When you are done, tap the Calendars button at the bottom of the screen. Tap the lowercase “i” icon next to the spam calendar, and on the next screen, swipe down and tap Delete Calendar to flush the added spam without responding to it. To make the spam invitations go to your iCloud mail — where they can be filtered or deleted more easily — instead of going right to your calendar, log onto your iCloud account on the web. Open the Calendar app, click the gear-shaped Settings icon in the lower-left corner and choose Preferences. In the Preferences box, click the Advanced tab, and under Invitations, click the button to have all calendar invitations go to your email account instead of your calendar. Click the Save button before you leave the screen. Original article located at: http://mobile.nytimes.com/2016/11/25/technology/personaltech/fighting-ios-calendar-spam.html?_r=0&referer=https://www.google.com/ -----Original Message----- From: [email protected] [mailto:[email protected]] On Behalf Of M. Taylor Sent: Friday, November 25, 2016 6:46 PM To: [email protected] Subject: A Question About Spam Calendar Event Invitations Hello Everyone, Just so you know, I am cross-posting this email. Earlier today, I received a calendar sales event invitation from an unknown sender. Upon opening the invitation from within my iOS Calendar app, it was clear that this was a spammer as I could see the list of invitees all of which were just variations on a theme, for example [email protected], [email protected], etc. The event invitation was promoting a weekend sale for sunglasses and the like. As a result, the event appeared across three different days, corresponding to the length of the event/sale; extremely annoying, to say the least. The only buttons I could find upon which to act was either Accept button, the maybe button, and the decline button. I did not want to activate any of these buttons as doing so would send a response to the sender, confirming the existence of my account. Try as I may, I could not discover anyway to simply delete the event invitation, itself, or the corresponding events from my Calendar, in iOS. Just so you know, When I activated the button that linked to the sender, whose account/email address consisted of Chinese characters, all I could do was to either add the sender to my Contacts List, share my location, etc. There was no option to block the sender nor anyway to report the event invitation as spam. Believe it or not, the most annoying thing, however, was not that the event was added to my Calendar, for the duration of the event, it was that it showed as an event to which I needed to reply. This means that the number 1 was constantly displayed on the Calendar's badge-app, icon. I called Apple Care but, after waiting on hold for what seemed like an interminable length of time, I decided to go it alone. At first, I thought about firing up my Mac and seeing if I could discover a way to delete the event from there. However, to be honest, my luck with the Mac OS Calendar application, has never been spectacular. Add to that, the fact that I was extremely angry at Apple for not providing some way to delete an event invitation without having to select an option that would alert the sender that any action on my part, had taken place. My solution? I simply fired up a Windows 7 PC that has the iCloud Control Panel for Windows installed, launched Microsoft Outlook 2007, located the offending invitation, and hit the delete key on the keyboard. Not including booting up the PC and launching Outlook, the deletion process took less than 10 seconds. When next I looked at my iOS Calendar, the invitation, along with its corresponding footprint, had been deleted, as expected. Question: Have any of you encountered spam Calendar event invitations? If so, how did you handle it? Were you able to delete the invitation without activating the Accept, Maybe, or Decline buttons? The only thing I wish I had attempted, before resorting to my beloved Windows PC, was to have explored the iCloud.com website to see if, perhaps there may have been a delete button somewhere that would have accomplished my goal. I look forward to your replies, Mark -- The following information is important for all members of the Mac Visionaries list. If you have any questions or concerns about the running of this list, or if you feel that a member's post is inappropriate, please contact the owners or moderators directly rather than posting on the list itself. Your Mac Visionaries list moderator is Mark Taylor. You can reach mark at: [email protected] and your owner is Cara Quinn - you can reach Cara at [email protected] The archives for this list can be searched at: http://www.mail-archive.com/[email protected]/ --- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "MacVisionaries" group. 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