
Google Calendar should prevent spam by default - dbatten
http://daynebatten.com/2018/02/google-should-prevent-calendar-spam/
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inetknght
So, another complaint about Google Calendar: how do I remove contacts'
birthdays from my calendar? I have hundreds of contacts -- almost all are
coworkers and almost none of which I care that it's their birthday. Many of
their birthdays show up on my Google Calendar. I don't want to remove the
showing of birthdays. I want to remove the showing of _individual peoples '_
birthdays.

~~~
jadedhacker
Even more so, I'm sorry to say I have contacts with friend(s) that died... I
don't necessarily want to remove them from my contact list, but the
(automated) birthday notification feels... unseemly... :-/

This would not be true of a manual one because it expresses the action
intentionally, whereas an automated one is kinda like an awkward stranger
being like hey it's their birthday today!

...

~~~
robinwassen
Sorry to hear that, it's an eerie reminder of our mortality.

You can edit the contact, remove the birthday and add it as a note to keep the
info but let it be handled in another way.

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beart
My biggest complaint with the automatic events has always been the inability
to treat them as my own events. If I want to make any changes to the event, I
have to copy it to my calendar. Doing so means there are now two versions of
the same event, and the one I copied will not automatically update if there is
a change. I've seen the automatic events update when, for example, my
itinerary changes.

I also hate that reminders do not get shared with other events and are google
calendar exclusive. This means I can't use a third party calendar app on my
phone if I want to use reminders.

~~~
shoover
Ugh. Google Calendar reminders are handled perfectly on Android. You get a
notification, and it stays there every time you look at your phone until you
clear it. On iOS, even with Google Calendar installed, you get the
notification one time (as if for a one-time event) and then it disappears into
the app.

I assume iOS Reminders work better than this, but I'm dependent on Google
Calendar. I have not figured out a workaround for notifications since
switching and I am now a less reliable person.

Why does the Google Calendar app not manage iOS reminder notifications as it
does on Android? Have I horked a notification setting unawares?

~~~
asdfgadsfgasfdg
Google calendar is fairly standards compliant. Just add the calendar to the
built in iOS calendar app....

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liquidgecka
Yea.. try having a short (5 character) @ gmail.com address.. For _years_ I
have dealt with this issue. Every time I seem to finally get things to not
automatically get added I get hit with another round of lazy google engineers
that don't add a UI option to disable this silliness.

Though, due to the short address I also get hundreds of legit calendar invites
that were just sent to the wrong people. I swear I know the whereabouts of
half the people in the country with names either starting with, or ending with
that combination. =/

~~~
mikestew
Same issue here; yoga memberships, rugby clubs, password resets for their real
email address. I haven’t had a bank password reset come through yet, but it is
a matter of time. Some of my namesakes, meh, they’re not so smart. Thankfully
I don’t use Google calendar, or I could see it being a real mess because many
of those emails are invites from other people who either got it wrong, or the
namesake is handing out the address he _wishes_ he had.

~~~
jjeaff
I have a very short email, just 3 letters @outlook and I get stuff all the
time from people signing up to things. I found that the only way to stop the
constant stream of update and emails or whatever is the moment I get an email
about "your new account" I go to the site, reset the password to something
random and then unsubscribe from all messages.

~~~
twothamendment
That is so mean, and so well deserved.

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JoshMnem
The new design is pretty awful too. Material Design has accessibility problems
for people with motion sensitivity. Everything animates, even if you aren't
supposed to be looking at it at the time. Sudden movement can cause nausea,
especially if there's an initial delay and/or parallax effect. Many people are
complaining about it.

There needs to be more aesthetic restraint. Animation should be a very thin
layer of icing on the cake, not 50% of the cake. "Animation spam" would be an
accurate term.

~~~
i1856511
Could you please provide a source for the anti-Material dialogue from an
accessibility perspective? I have been suspicious that this might be the case,
with Google and other companies.

~~~
JoshMnem
I'll try to round up some comments later tonight.

I have visual-motion sensitivity, and plan to write some articles on some of
the problems with recent animation trends. I'm also planning on creating
browser extensions that disable CSS animations and other spammy problems with
UI design.

It's really difficult for me to use Google's new designs. I switched to
Thunderbird/Lightning until I can find a Google Calendar replacement. I
removed most apps from my phone and turned off most notifications, because
it's too stressful to use it. There needs to be a low-animation setting.

Designers should be asking themselves, "how do I make this UI functionality
clear with the absolute minimum of animation?"

~~~
milas
At least on Android you can disable most animation in the Developer Settings
app. I'm guessing how much that affects individual apps varies wildly,
however.

~~~
crtasm
I set three options for animation to 0/disabled in there. Phone felt much
faster but it took me a couple weeks to realise why Blackberry's swishy
"you're plugged in, want to fast charge? or transfer data?" semicircle popup
was no longer appearing.

No way to transfer data without reenabling one of the options.

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dbatten
Not sure if submitting my own blog is discouraged on here, but I'm hoping to
get the word out and get this shut down.

~~~
patorjk
Thank you for posting this. This issue happened to me for the first time last
week - I thought my account had been hacked. I had no idea how a rouge spammy
event got added to my calendar. I ended up resetting my password and spending
over an hour pouring over other aspects of my account to make sure nothing
else was compromised. It's mind boggling to think this could have been because
of a spam message.

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brongondwana
Wow - I spoke on this exact topic at M3AAWG today. We're working on trying to
get the email abuse teams and calendar teams at companies working together. As
a member of both M3AAWG and CalConnect, it's particularly interesting to me.

CalConnect blogged about this last year:

[https://www.calconnect.org/news/2017/01/30/calendar-
spam](https://www.calconnect.org/news/2017/01/30/calendar-spam)

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op00to
I fell victim to this spam, and it was incredibly difficult to get rid of, due
to bugs on Google's side. Simply unchecking the box didn't seem to make the
invites go away, and I was unable to delete them. Eventually, I used the GCal
API to go in and blow everything away. Ugh.

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ufmace
I got one of these for the first time a week or so ago. I don't think the spam
was originally spam-filtered. Really crazy that they will let anyone who knows
your email address put events on your calendar.

Speaking of crazy dumb, the thing that recognizes your flight emails and tells
you to go to your flight is nice... for your flight. But it's common at least
for me for people coming into town to just forward me their flight emails.
Google picks those up and assumes they're my flights, and keeps sending me
notifications about getting to "my" flight from somewhere in another state to
the city I'm in now. I'm amazed that they haven't put in even a teeny bit of
effort to solve that one.

~~~
abraham
I find it a great feature to get updates on the travel plans of people
visiting me.

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kiliancs
> By default, don't automatically import events from Gmail. If I agree to
> attend the event, then add it.

Not sure about this one. Even without having accepted it I might want to be
aware of what's going on. At least in my case I've found it useful in the
past. Plus, you are assuming you'll accept the invite from Gmail, but other
people might do that from Google Calendar.

~~~
aroundtown
> I might want to be aware of what's going on.

I guess you don't have a problem with other people signing up for services
with your email address.

I have a <first-initial><middle-initial><last-name>@gmail and several people
like to sign up for deliveries and airlines using my email address.

I get to know ALL about Richard's flight to Boston, or Rachel's Adult Themed
party night, or recently, how Reggie sent $40 worth of flowers to his wife,
but $120 to his mistress.

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runlevel1
Apple had a similar problem a little over a year ago:
[https://arstechnica.com/information-
technology/2016/11/how-t...](https://arstechnica.com/information-
technology/2016/11/how-to-stop-the-wave-of-apple-calendar-alert-spam/)

Anyone known if/how they fixed it?

~~~
saagarjha
They've certainly put time into trying to fix it. Whether their spam detection
algorithms are good enough to block out invites like these, I have no idea.

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jarcoal
This isn't an issue that's exclusive to Google Calendar; Office 365 also does
this, as well as numerous other mail+calendar apps.

I believe it's related to the iCalendar spec.
[https://icalendar.org/](https://icalendar.org/)

~~~
ickler8
Unless I'm mistaken, I really don't believe it's an issue with the spec.
There's nothing in iCal (RFC 5545) that says you have to take iCal objects
attached to emails and automatically include them in the calendar. In fact,
iCal servers are simply configured to accept the xml requests and distribute a
list of VEVENT objects (among others) for display. They aren't inherently
connected to a working inbox.

My guess is they have loose rules around auto-adding iCal attachments detected
in IMAP/Mime messages. It's notoriously difficult to get email and calendars
working. There's a reason ActiveSync is so damn expensive.

~~~
brongondwana
Yeah - At FastMail we default to only adding if it comes from someone in your
addressbook. You can reduce it to just an addressbook group, or open to the
world if you feel like living dangerously.

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Raphmedia
Urgh, this happened to me this week. My calendar somehow got filled with fake
hotel reservations.

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sachleen
I've never experienced this as a form of spam myself but I have noticed that
some times events will get added to my calendar without me seeing the email
message. I'll see something on my calendar and think "I don't remember
this..." but if I had just seen it in my inbox, I would have marked it Done
and remembered it, even if it was way in the future.

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ashtube
100% agree with this post. I get these spam messages all the time and the
worst part is it generates a push notification on my mobile. I see the fix to
turn it off, but I rely on the functionality of events being added from my
other genuine contacts in my Gmail. It should totally be from contacts on your
contact list only.

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nikofeyn
i just wish even gmail would prevent spam. for the past month or so, i have
been getting increasing amounts of spam hitting my inbox. i wonder what google
is good at anymore besides making their products worse. youtube has been
nothing but a study of poor usability design.

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orionblastar
I keep getting added to MLM and Pyramid scams, someone just enters my email a
few times a week at midnight or 3am so they must be from another time zone. Is
there a way to block that user?

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justincormack
I like auto adding, but not of spam. I like the way it finds my flights etc,
where it doesnt give me a choice. But adding the spam events every day for a
yesr is obviously stupid.

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mayneack
I must have less spam email because I really like this feature as it only
seems to read things I want events for (hotel visits, flights, etc)

~~~
analogmemory
I’d assume so the spam calendar invites stopped one day and I had forgotten
about that annoying issue

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tehwebguy
I just want to be able to scroll normally in month view. Instead it has like a
point where it snaps to the next month.

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chuckreynolds
yup... tweeted about this last week. SUPER annoying and it's fairly frequent
recently.
[https://twitter.com/ChuckReynolds/status/965037661940367360](https://twitter.com/ChuckReynolds/status/965037661940367360)

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jageen
My suggestion is create petition on change.org :) it seems effective for the
case of snapchat :p.

