Google Drive’s spam blocking measures are being extended to Docs, Sheets, and Slides

Have you ever received a weird email letting you know that someone has invited you to a Google Calendar meeting or that they’ve added a comment to your document in Google Docs? What about an email indicating that someone wishes to share a file with you in Drive? My guess is that many of you reading this have had these sorts of requests from people you simply don’t know – so have I!

Google has done some work to combat this since earlier this year, like allowing you to block spam users in Drive, but the issue persists across the board. The more popular its services get, the more they will be targeted as individuals and malicious companies seek to exploit Google’s users and mine their valuable data.

Luckily, the company’s work continues, and it’s extending the aforementioned Drive user blocking feature to Google Docs. Now, instead of just being able to prevent spammers from sending you things overall through the umbrella service, you’ll also have the ability to prevent notifications and comments, including mentions and action items from being sent to you from people you don’t know!

Any time someone injects a comment in a document, you’re notified via the Google Chat app thanks to the inbuilt Drive bot, as well as in Gmail, and in the Docs app. Going forward, all of these means of bugging the user with spam will be blocked across Docs, Sheets, and Slides.

To clarify, this will only apply to users that you block in Drive, and this is meant to be an extension of that feature’s awesome capabilities. It will begin rolling out to all Workspace customers as well as those with G Suite Basic and Business licenses over the next two weeks. This applies to both Rapid Release and Scheduled Release domains, by the way! The fact that Google isn’t allowing Scheduled Release domains to sit back and wait for this shows how important it is, in my opinion.

There’s nothing for administrators to do here as it will be enabled by default and no control exists to disable it. After all, why would you want to, right? Just be aware that users can’t be blocked within the same domain or in trusted domains. This blocking tool is simply meant to be a way to handle external spammers.