“Over the past few weeks—and particularly over the retail adventure widely referred to as ‘Black Friday’ — many Apple device owners experienced a new form of unsolicited and unwanted messages: a swarm of calendar alerts for online ‘deals’ from spammers,” Sean Gallagher reports for Ars Technica. “The messages took advantage of the default settings in Apple’s iCloud calendar service, allowing senders to automatically push calendar alerts to Apple iOS and macOS users and bypass e-mail entirely.”
“Getting rid of these calendar ‘invites’ is a problem in itself, as declining them sends a message back to the spammer—confirming that someone actually is monitoring the iCloud account they targeted and encouraging them to send more messages,” Gallagher reports. “Getting rid of the unwanted alerts requires a multi-step workaround. But blocking them entirely only requires a single change to iCloud settings.”
Read more in the full article here.
MacDailyNews Take: Done!
why was this the default in the first place, wouldn’t it seem more useful to get calendar entries from email and not apps? what am i missing here?
Yes! You only have to defeat the entire purpose of the feature to avoid the stupid bug. Seriously, would it be so hard for Apple to only automatically add calendar events for either favorite contacts or at least contacts in your contacts app? Then a spammer couldn’t take advantage of Apple short-sightedness. I don’t mind someone I’m doing business with or a family member proposing an event. It’s total strangers that shouldn’t do that.
Another way to fix this is not use iCloud and have email, contact and calendar sync through MobileSync with this: https://www.thexyz.com/mobilesync.htmlAnother way to fix this is not use iCloud and have email, contact and calendar sync through MobileSync with this: https://www.thexyz.com/mobilesync.html