Calendar Spam

Posted on June 20, 2008

Stupid smart spammers!

So you think you’ve beaten the spammers because you disabled previews in your email and never open messages from anyone you don’t know or have reason to expect would be sending you email? Time to rethink. They are stupid to us because they are intrusive and at the same time they’re definitely smart. Spammers have started using the calendar features of Google Calendar and Microsoft Outlook to get the job done.

Here’s the way it works. You receive a meeting request with a subject line that appears to be spam, so you delete it. It’s simple, but guess what, the meeting shows up in your calendar anyway! The problem is that calendar software defaults to reserving the meeting, or at least blocking out the time for it.

So let’s fix your Google Calendar to prevent this from happening. If you’ve enabled notifications for “New invitations,” you can configure your settings to show only events you’ve created or accepted. Click on Settings at the top of any Google Calendar page, select the General tab, and in the Automatically add invitations to my calendar section, select No, only show invitations to which I have responded.

To stop Microsoft Outlook from automatically accepting meeting requests, go to the Tools menu, click Options, and then Calendar Options. Under Advanced options, click Resource Scheduling, then clear the Automatically accept meeting requests and process cancellations check box.

Now they’ll have to think up something else to try. Never fear, they will! It’s just a matter of time.