Google Calendar’s “known senders” filter ought to assist stamp out spam invitations

Google Calendar’s new “known senders” option is meant to make it simpler to maintain spam from clogging up your schedule. Toggling on the setting prevents invitations from individuals you don’t know from routinely showing in your Calendar. This means, Google Calendar will solely routinely add invitations from individuals in your contacts record, anybody you’ve interacted with by means of Workspace, and customers in your organization or group.

If you’re aware of Google Calendar, you’ll know that Google routinely provides occasions to your schedule based mostly on the emailed invitations you obtain. Letting the floodgates open by permitting Google Calendar so as to add occasions obtained by “everyone” might imply having a calendar infested with pretend and annoying occasions. While there’s technically a workaround for this, Google has made it fairly inconvenient — it entails disabling computerized occasion including altogether, which implies it’s a must to reply to every invite.

Google promised a repair for this all the way in which again in 2019, and now the corporate has added this resolution. You can activate the brand new filter by navigating to your Google Calendar settings and selecting Events Settings. From right here, choose the Add invites to my calendar dropdown and select Only if the sender is understood.

Google says this setting doesn’t stop you from receiving spammy invitations, nonetheless. You can hold these from showing in your Calendar by simply not accepting them. On a support page, Google notes that selecting this setting might divulge to a sender that you just don’t have them in your contacts record (if that issues to you).

This isn’t the one small however useful change Google has made to its Workspace apps as of late. Last month, Google tweaked Calendar invitations to make them simpler to learn and rolled out a revamp of Gmail. In an replace final 12 months, it additionally addressed a loophole that allow individuals retailer spammy or abusive shared folders on different customers’ Drives.