Google Calendar releases new spam protection

Spam in your calendar? It’s not something that most of us think about -- the word brings to mind email and phone calls and even just old-fashioned snail mail. But your online calendar is also a very real target and it may be growing worse. 

It’s actually fairly ingenious; a spammer sends an invite to an event and, even if the email invitation goes to your spam folder, the event still goes to your Google Calendar. When you click on the event in your calendar it contains a malicious link. Even if you click 'decline' it can still take you to possible NSFW content, or worse. Plus, declining will simply cross out the appointment and leave the reminder behind.  

Now Google has taken a new step to help users prevent this activity from occurring. The company is rolling out a new option. It’s a bit hidden in your settings, but you should receive a pop-up that offers to explain it. 

If you ignored the message, then you can still take the necessary steps. At the top right of your calendar click the settings icon (the gear), choose "settings" and scroll down to "event settings." Alternately, you can click that option in the left column to save the scrolling. 

From there, simply click under the "add invitations to my calendar" option and click the drop-down menu. You will now see an "when I respond to the email" option that you can switch to. Since a fair amount of these messages will go to your spam folder anyway, that will cut down quite a lot and any that end up in your inbox can simply be deleted. 

That’s all there is to it. It’s a simple update, but it can save you some grief if you are a Google Calendar user.