An increasing number of iPhone users are being spammed through calendar invites for deals and sales believed to originate from Chinese spammers.
Read more: Infoporn: the rise and fall of the UK's biggest spammer
The invites began appearing last week and reports have been rising since.
The invites look like traditional iCloud calendar invites that are automatically put into your calendar, and which require you to accept or decline the invitation. They not only appear in your calendar, they can also appear as pop-up and in-app notifications.
You may be inclined to reject the invite. Don't. That will let the spammer know the email account associated with the app is active and will encourage even more spam.
After a couple of weeks of the problem persisting, Apple, has introduced a partial fix to the problem. According to 9 to 5 Mac the firm has introduced a 'Report Junk Feature' to the iCloud.com platform.
This allows for spammy invitations to be removed and flagged to Apple – with the company presumably looking for repeat offenders or patterns in the requests. So far the fix is only available on the iCloud.com platform, but it is likely the feature will be rolled out to native iOS and Mac Calendar apps in the future.
For those not using the iCloud.com web app, here's a few other ways to prevent getting spammy notifications on your devices.
The default setting on the Calendar app is to send all invites in the form of in-app notifications, but you can change this by going to Settings, Notifications, and disabling all notifications in Calendar.
**The downside?**Although this will stop the spam notifications from appearing, it will also prevent non-spam notifications showing up. Alternatively, you can block just invitation notifications from appearing.
Rather than disabling notifications and invites entirely in the iCloud Calendar app, you can get them sent to you via email instead. Log into iCloud.com, go to Calendar and on the cog icon in the bottom left-hand corner, go to Preferences, Advanced. Enable the 'Email to [your email address] option and this will switch from in-app notifications to email.
You will still receive the spam notifications but they will arrive in your inbox rather than on your phone and your email provider may be able to automatically identify them as spam and filter them out.
The downside? You may miss legitimate invites from friends and family.
You can 'connect' multiple calendars to the Calendar app, such as work, home, and so on, and the spam invites can be redirected to one of these. Open the Calendar app and press Calendars at the bottom of the screen to see the full list of your connected iCloud calendars.
Select Edit in the top left-hand corner of the screen and Add Calendar. Give this new, soon-to-be-hidden, calendar a name (such as spam), select a colour and click Done.
Return to the main Calendar app screen and press Inbox in the bottom right-hand corner to see all the invites you have recently received. If you have already rejected the spam invites they will appear on the 'Replied' tab. Select an invite, click Calendar about half-way down the screen and choose which calendar the invite should be moved to. This entire calendar and all of its spam invites can then be deleted.
**The downside?**You will have to do this manually for every spam invite received.
The reason spam invites are pushed to your phone is because your calendar is synced with your email and other accounts via iCloud. You can disable this syncing option, which will stop all spam invites from being received.
Go to Settings, iCloud and disable the option for Calendar in the list. You can choose to keep all the previously synced appointments on your phone, or delete them. The downside? Your calendar will no longer sync with iCloud. This will stop all legitimate invites being sent and received on your phone.
This article was originally published by WIRED UK
