Over the weekend, a lot of people I know have been affected by the iCloud calendar spam. It’s a smart move by the spammers. Because email filters are now so good, they’re look at alternative sources. Turns out, iCloud’s filtering system isn’t so good after all. And just like that, we end up with invitations to “events” for buying “Ray-ban”s.

You must think, just hit “Decline” and it will go away. That’s the worst thing you can do. Now the spammers know that this particular address is actually real. So before Apple decides to do something about it, we’ll need to use some fixes and workarounds – things that don’t alert spammers about our activity.

Solution 1: Stop The Spam Notifications from iCloud

The most annoying part of this is the notifications that come in. There’s a way to stop in-app notifications for new invites and send them to your email instead. There, thanks to better spam filters, it will get caught. But this also means you won’t get any sort of notifications for any sort of invite.

For me, personally this isn’t a big issue because I don’t use iCloud as my default email (thank god for that). If you’re in a similar situation, try the fix below (if not, try the second fix).

Step 1: Open iCloud.com and login.

Step 2: Click on “Calendar“.

Step 3: Click the gear icon in the bottom and select “Preferences“.

Step 4: Go to the “Advanced” section, scroll down to “Invitations” and select the radio button next to “Email to [email protected]”. Then hit “Save“.

Solution 2: Delete Invites Using A Different Calendar

If you do need notifications from iCloud calendar, you can try another fix. This involves creating a different calendar, moving the spam invites there and then deleting it to get rid of the invites. This way the spammers don’t know you’re acting on them. Only issue is you’ll need to do this every time you get new invites.

Step 1: After opening the Calendar app, tap on “Calendars” button at the bottom of the screen.

Step 2: Tap on “Edit” and select “Add Calendars“.

Step 3: Name the calendar something like “Spam” and tap on “Done“.

Step 4: Now let’s move the spam invite into the “Spam” calendar. Select the spam invite and from the detailed view tap on “Calendar“. From here select the calendar you just made.

Step 5: Tap on Calendars at the bottom, tap on the “i” next to the Spam calendar, swipe to the bottom and tap on “Delete Calendar“. This will delete the calendar and the invites with it.

The advantage is that the spammers won’t know that you’ve taken any action on it.

Better Spam Filters In Next Update?

A lot of people have been affected by this spam and I hope all the coverage gets Apple to beef up its spam filters. Apple is usually good with this kind of stuff – fixing security risks with updates. I hope they do the same with this one.