Apple will soon introduce a new ‘report junk’ button to its calendar app following a big increase in spam notifications.
Users of the Calendar app have been bombarded with notifications and invitations from spammers in recent weeks, with the spam reaching a high around Black Friday.
The invites look like any other iCloud calendar invite, asking users to either accept or decline, but came from Chinese email addresses and were mostly for fake sales at well-known brands.
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Declining the invites simply let spammers know the email address they had targeted was active, leaving users with no real way of getting around the irritating notifications, other than disabling their iCloud account.
But Apple seems to have finally taken notice, adding the ‘report junk’ button to its iCloud.com site, while an upcoming iOS update should bring the new feature to mobile devices.
The new button will appear in any notification from a contact not included in a user’s contact list, and when pressed, will remove the invitation from the calendar and inform Apple that the message has been received.
As iOS is yet to be updated, users will have to visit the iCloud site in order to report junk invitations for the time being,
According to MacRumours, a Reddit user claimed an Apple Support representative has confirmed the update will come to the iOS Calendar app.
Although spam invites are nothing new for Apple’s Calendar service, the bogus notifications have increased dramatically in recent weeks and sometimes take the form of photo-sharing alerts.
Switching calendar alerts to email, using the Advanced settings in iCloud, provides a temporary workaround, but that method simply redirects the spam notifications, along with legitimate ones, to users’ email, where they can be deleted.
It seems Apple is now set to make good on its promise for a fix, then, and we’ll update you once we have confirmation of when the ‘report junk’ button will hit the iOS Calendar app.
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Have you been experiencing a rise in spam messages recently? Let us know in the comments.
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Editorial independence
Editorial independence means being able to give an unbiased verdict about a product or company, with the avoidance of conflicts of interest. To ensure this is possible, every member of the editorial staff follows a clear code of conduct.
Professional conduct
We also expect our journalists to follow clear ethical standards in their work. Our staff members must strive for honesty and accuracy in everything they do. We follow the IPSO Editors’ code of practice to underpin these standards.
