Google Calendar is now automatically enabling spam protection on your behalf

Between bad actors maliciously attacking Google Classroom and Calendar invites, Google has had a less-than-ideal time trying to find ways to mitigate this loophole. Basically, anyone can plug your email address into an invite and send you a request to connect in these services, and by their very nature, you become instantly susceptible to something you never asked for.

Those same scammers would then fill out the invite description with something misleading, asking you to visit a phishing website or to in some way deliver your personal information to them. Other instances have seen inappropriate content littering your inbox, which is entirely unacceptable, especially where Google Classroom users are concerned.

Now, it looks like the company is automatically enabling spam-blocking measures in Calendar to prevent these situations from getting out of hand. I did get this message myself but unfortunately clicked “Got it” to dismiss the pop-up before I had a chance to screenshot it. Luckily, Android Police did manage to grab one (see below).

As you can see, a dialogue box stating that “invitations from people you might not know won’t automatically appear on your calendar”. Google then goes on to explain that “You can still respond to the invitations in your email” in order to get them to appear on your calendar. This simple fix should help keep a bunch of crap you never wanted from appearing on your schedule.

Well, that is unless Google accidentally fills out your events for the day with promotional emails like it did a while back – that was bizarre. Anyway, let me know in the comments if you’re seeing this new option being automatically enabled, and if you’ve seen calendar spam in the past!

If you tap “Manage setting”, you will be taken to an “Adding invitations” options screen where you can select to let invitations appear on your calendar by default from everyone, only if the sender is known, or only when you respond via email. This won’t stop the spam emails from coming in, and Google clearly has more work to do to filter these out without relying on the end user, but we’ll see what happens over the next six months or so in regard to that.