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Recently, I’ve received a couple of spam event invitations in Calendar on my Mac. The most recent had only Chinese text, and recurred at 5:46am every day.

I am able to decline these by clicking on the invitations button in the toolbar (that only appears when an invitation comes in). However, ideally I’d like to not receive these spam invitations at all.

As I’ve never received a genuine invitation through Calendar, I thought I might be able to turn off the invitation feature. However, I can’t see any controls for this in Calendar preferences or the Internet Account system preferences.

Through what mechanism do these invitation arrive? If I understood what mechanism it was, I might be able to turn it off. I have two Calendar accounts enabled: iCloud, and Facebook. I can’t see anything in my e-mail, so I presume they’re not regular e-mail spam.

Since first writing this question, I’ve had a similar invitation come through in Reminders:

Spam Reminder invitation

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2 Answers 2

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It's simply that anyone can send an email to you. If spam rules don't block it, Apple software (with default settings) processes the invitation before you can take any action.

To prevent this automatic processing, try this.

Log in to iCloud on the web, open your calendar and go to ⚙ > Preferences (in the lower left corner). Under Advanced tab you’ll find an option to receive calendar invitations by e-mail instead of directly to your calendar.

enter image description here

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  • Hey that looks good — I’ve given that a go, it’ll be interesting to see if any more spam ones come through and show up in my e-mail.
    – Paul D. Waite
    Nov 10, 2016 at 22:44
  • I know! I’ve since had a similar spam invitation appear in Reminders, which sadly does not have an equivalent settings screen on iCloud.com.
    – Paul D. Waite
    Nov 17, 2016 at 23:10
  • Probably you could post a new question about it.
    – Denis Rasulev
    Nov 18, 2016 at 3:47
  • Feels like it’s the same issue to me.
    – Paul D. Waite
    Nov 18, 2016 at 10:36
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Invitations can only come through direct email input, meaning that the inviter has your email address. How did the inviter get hold of your email? that's another issue.

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  • “Invitations can only come through direct email input” — so they come through e-mail, but only show up in Calendar, and not at all in Mail?
    – Paul D. Waite
    Nov 3, 2016 at 14:21
  • If I would like to invite you into an even I would have to key-in your email address in the invitee's section. Doing so you will receive an invitation directly in your calendar where you can accept or reject. If you haven't received an email it's probably because the invitation is made through Apple's calendar. Meaning that they used a Mac to create the event.
    – Yousif Al-Raheem
    Nov 3, 2016 at 22:25
  • You can report the email that keeps inviting your as a spam if you want to. Visit this link for more details:
    – Yousif Al-Raheem
    Nov 3, 2016 at 22:26
  • apple.com/legal/more-resources/phishing
    – Yousif Al-Raheem
    Nov 3, 2016 at 22:26
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    Gotcha — so the invitations probably go through my iCloud calendar account. That link doesn’t help me to report these, because it asks us to forward illegitimate e-mails to Apple. As I say, I don’t think I’m getting e-mails, just Calendar invitations.
    – Paul D. Waite
    Nov 3, 2016 at 22:49

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