Over the past few weeks—and particularly over the retail adventure widely referred to as "Black Friday"—many Apple device owners experienced a new form of unsolicited and unwanted messages: a swarm of calendar alerts for online "deals" from spammers. The messages took advantage of the default settings in Apple’s iCloud calendar service, allowing senders to automatically push calendar alerts to Apple iOS and macOS users and bypass e-mail entirely.
Getting rid of these calendar "invites" is a problem in itself, as declining them sends a message back to the spammer—confirming that someone actually is monitoring the iCloud account they targeted and encouraging them to send more messages. Getting rid of the unwanted alerts requires a multi-step workaround. But blocking them entirely only requires a single change to iCloud settings.
To get rid of the invites without sending a response to the spammer, you’ll need to do the following:
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Create a new iCloud calendar. Go to the Calendar app, tap "Calendars," then "Edit," then "Add Calendar…" in your iCloud calendars list.
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I used "Delete Me" as the calendar name.
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Change the category of spam calendar invites to the new calendar. Open the event, tap the ">" on the Calendar bar for the event…
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…and select the spam calendar.
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Once the calendar for the event is changed…
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Go back to the Calendars list, tap "Edit" again, and then tap on the ">" next to the spam calendar you created. Scroll to the bottom of the Edit Calendar screen, and tap "Delete Calendar."
The spam invites will now be gone without sending a response back to the spammer.
Blocking future calendar spam is less involved but requires a visit to your iCloud account via a Web browser. Log in to iCloud and go to the Calendar Web app, click on the Settings gear icon in the bottom left corner of the Calendar view, and click Preferences.
The pop-up menu on the iCloud Calendar Web view, Pick "Preferences."
Click the "Advanced" button in the Preferences pop-up window. At the bottom of the window, change the Invitations setting for "Receive event invitations as:" from "In-app notifications" to "Email to [your iCloud account address]."
This will turn off the automatic integration of iCloud Calendar with your Calendar app and allow your spam filters to block unwanted invitations.
via Ars Technica
How to stop the wave of Apple Calendar invite spam