Google Calendar Spam?

You're not going insane, don't panic. It turns out that there is indeed a bit of a loophole in how Google Calendar accepts invitations from unknown parties, and in the last few weeks spammers have indeed figured out sneak ways to use that to add spam messages (events?) to your calendar.

The Google Calendar team even noted: "I'm really sorry to hear that you're receiving reminders for spammy events and seeing these events on your Google Calendar. The team hates spam just as much as you guys do and we're working hard to keep it out of Google Calendar."

Let's start at the beginning, though.

Here's what a spammy calendar event looks like:

In addition to the weird event name (I rarely have events that encourage me to contact a FEDEX COURIER) (which leads me to wonder why they don't have spammy event titles like "Meet Sue for Lunch downtown" which are more likely to be clicked upon than these idiotic titles. But maybe I shouldn't say anything?) the question mark icon denotes events that I'm invited to join but haven't yet accepted.

What you want to do to block these in the future is to disable public invitations. This is done by going to "Settings" then scrolling down until you see the following:

Simply change this from "Yes" to "No", save your new settings and you've stopped this problem recurring forever. Or at least until the next time those wily spammers figure out a workaround and bother us again.