If you are a Google Calendar user, you may have been surprised to receive on some occasions a reminder of an event you didn’t know about until now and what was hosted by someone you don’t know at all. If that was the case, don’t worry, or at least don’t worry too much. This is another spam technique that takes advantage of Google Calendar’s ability to add attendees to an event and automatically join the event. This happened to me a few months ago and I’ll admit it confused me even though I was obviously ignoring it.

Google is aware of this fraudulent use of the Google Calendar event invitation, which in some cases can also be used in phishing attacks, to the extent that a few years ago he claimed that he was working on it and that the solution would not be long in coming. For whatever reason, it ended up taking longer than expected, forcing affected users to disable auto-add events entirely, meaning they have to respond to each invite individually.

They say that if luck is good, it’s never too late, and in this case it certainly is, as Google announced on its blog that a new feature has been enabled that, once activated will allow automatic addition of only events scheduled by known contacts to Google Calendar. The rest, i.e. those from senders we don’t know, we’ll have to approve (or reject, of course) manually, preventing them from being added to our calendar without our approval.

In October of last year, I surprisingly found myself in my personal calendar with a stay at a place I didn’t know, which had a somewhat suspicious URL in the description.

Of course, fraudulent invitations have not ended with this solution since then we will still get them and we will have to beg for them, but that’s something we can work around when it suits us, and it will prevent us from encountering unwanted events. On the other hand, or more precisely, on the negative side, Google points out that you are choosing this setting can tell the sender that you don’t have them in your contact listsomething that can be a problem under certain circumstances.

Be that as it may, and given the increase in spam of this type, personally, it seems to me to be the best possible solutionbecause we will continue to count on automatically adding those people we want to be able to add us to the events they program, but we will create a barrier that prevents strangers or people with whom we do not have enough contact from adding events to our calendar without our consent.