A lot of complaints came up over the last couple of weeks by Mac, iPhone, or iPad users about mass invitations flooding their Apple calendar. They weren’t expecting any invitations – for sure none that were sent from fishy email addresses. The worst part: By acting on these invitations you’ll send a response and these dubious sources know that your Apple account is still valid and active. Apple’s policy of connecting any stored credit card of yours to the Apple account, makes everyone who response therefor an interesting target.
What do these invitations look like?
These invitations often have subjects like “Black Friday Rayban Offer” or “Cyber Monday Offer”. Furthermore, they’re sent to a huge list of recipients – most likely they’re unknown to you.
In order to safely remove these anonymous invitations from your Apple calendar follow these simple steps
- Go to your Calendar app.
- Expand the Calendars list.
- In order to filter the events, deactivate all calendars but the one with the invitations.
- Go to ‘File’, ‘New Calendar’, give it any name you want.
- Move all the unknown events to that calendar. For this open them up and change the ‘Calendar’ they belong to.
- Last but not least delete the calendar with the new and unwanted events.
Did it work? Great! But you’re not done yet!
Allow your spam filter to block unwanted invitations
For this you will have to login into your Apple account on a desktop computer. Your mobile devices (especially Safari on iOS) unfortunately will not show the “Save” button for the following settings.
- Log into your iCloud account over a web browser.
- In the web version of your calendar click on the ‘Settings’ icon in the bottom left corner.
- Pick ‘Preferences’ and click the ‘Advanced’ button.
- Change the ‘Invitations’ setting to ‘Email to [email address]’.
With this you will ensure that your iCloud calendar events will not be integrated automatically into your calendar app anymore. Additionally, unwanted invitations might already be blocked by your spam filter. Happy free-of-spam-invitations-Day! 😉
This post is also available in: German