Those annoying and malicious spam invites in Google Calendar are about to stop soon.
Google says it's working on resolving the issue once and for all, but it has yet to say when it's going to roll out the fix.
Google Calendar Spam Solution Underway
As reported earlier by Android Police, the Mountain View brand addressed the issue on the Google Support forums.
"We're aware of the spam occurring in Calendar and are working diligently to resolve this issue. We'll post updates to this thread as they become available," Lesley Pace, a Google employee, says.
Regarding how the scam works, attackers would take advantage of Gmail's default setting that automatically adds items to Calendar whenever an email has details of an event. This occurs even if the messages are marked as spam. Others send an invitation to users directly as well.
It's more than an annoyance, as scammers include links to phishing websites in these invites and attempt to get users to click them.
Google also recommends not responding to these kinds of Calendar invites and to instead report them as spam on a PC, which is as simple as opening Calendar on the desktop, double-clicking on an event, and hitting More Actions and then Report as Spam.
Temporary Fix
One work-around at the moment to stop these malicious invites is to tweak the settings in Calendar and Gmail, but that could inconvenience certain users. At any rate, it's arguably better to be safe than sorry.
To stop Calendar from adding invites, just go to the web version of the app, click the cog icon in the upper-right corner, and hit Settings. In the menu on the left, click on "Event settings" and then "Automatically add invitations" and choose "No, only show invitations to which I have responded."
Next, to prevent Calendar items from being created via emails, click on Events from Gmail in the menu on the left in the same Settings page and disable "Automatically add events from Gmail to my calendar." A warning will pop up here, but just click OK.
