How to get rid of iCloud calendar invitation spam

‘Tis the season for iCloud Calendar invitation spam! Black Friday and Cyber Monday just passed and many users of Apple devices are getting a large influx of spam calendar invitations. These show up as deals for Ray-Ban glasses, Louis Vuitton, and other brands.

The bad news is you can’t stop them entirely, but the good news is that you can manage these spam invitations in a few different ways.

Don’t act on the invite

First and foremost, don’t tap Accept, Maybe or Decline when encountering these events. While true that the event will stay on your calendar if you ignore it, if you act on the event, this will send a response to the person who spammed you in the first place. It lets them know that your email address is active, and they can spam you some more.

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Move spam calendar alerts to your email

One workaround for these spam invites is to move the invitations to your e-mail address rather than receiving notifications for the events. One note, it’s easier to use this workaround from a computer, but you can also use it by requesting desktop site on your iPhone or iPad. To request a desktop site in iOS, long press on the reload button in Safari and then press request desktop site.

1. Go to the iCloud.com website and log in with your credentials.
2. Click on Calendar.
3. In the lower left of your screen, click on the Settings gear icon.
4. Click on Preferences to go into your Calendar preferences.
5. In the preferences pane, click on Advanced.
6. Scroll down to the Invitations section and choose to receive event invitations as e-mail.

One caveat to sending these invitations to your e-mail rather than them showing up as notifications, is that if you use your iCloud calendar as your default calendar, you’ll also miss real event invitations. If you’re using something like Gmail instead, this workaround will work for you.

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Make a spam calendar to move invitations to

The tip above will work for the visibility of these invites (you won’t see them as notifications, you’ll only see them in your inbox). The issue still remains that if you don’t act on these events (and you shouldn’t), they’ll stick around on your calendar.

While researching this issue on the Apple Support Community, I noticed many users suggesting making a spam calendar to move these invites to.

This tip is helpful for a number of reasons. First, you can choose to never view your Spam calendar in your calendar app of choice, or alternatively, you can choose to delete the calendar entirely (a little more work each time you receive an event invitation).

Here’s a quick way to create a new calendar in iOS and move these spam events to it.

1. Open up the Calendar app on your iOS device.
2. Tap on Edit in the upper left corner of your screen.
3. Tap on Add Calendar under iCloud.
4. Title your calendar and give it a color, and then tap on Done.
5. Now, navigate to the spam event and tap on Calendar when you’re viewing the invitation.
6. Simply move your spam invite to your new spam calendar, and enjoy never seeing it on your calendar again! (make sure in the calendars section you’ve unchecked the spam calendar so it doesn’t show up.)

Spam event invitations no more!

Hopefully these tips help you manage with spam invitations until Apple gives us a better way to deal with them! What do you do to deal with iCloud spam? Let me know in the comments section below.