Apple relies on users to deal with calendar spam

Apple is known as a manufacturer that is always looking to offer a simple and intuitive approach to technological matters, so the way that Tim Cook & Co. are dealing with the recent outbreak of junk invitations on iCloud's calendar is not surprising but requires a bit of effort from the user's side.

The company implemented a “report junk” button on iCloud.com, which allows users to manually report any spam that they have received in the form of invites. The problem drew a lot of attention around this year's Black Friday, as a lot of users were “bombarded” with fake calendar invites, most of which were sent from scammers, mainly from Chinese domains.

Before the “report junk” feature was added, if a person decided to just delete these fraudulent appointments, very often the endeavor would be counterproductive as this action informed the spammer that the account is active and usually this resulted in more phony requests. With the new addition from Apple this is no longer the case, but manually marking each invitation can be a rather time-consuming undertaking. Furthermore, the junk marking feature is currently only available on iCloud.com, but a future iOS update should enable this function for the iPhone and iPod.

source: BBC