Google Calendar is getting better at weeding out spam invites

Google Calendar has released a new update for an issue that it promised to fix three years ago. The “known senders” feature will finally let you block invitations from people you don’t know that can effectively spam up your calendar. With the “Only if the sender is known” toggle enabled under “Event settings,” it’ll automatically add invites only from people in your contacts list, people you’ve interacted with, or users on the same domain. 

Normally, Google Calendar automatically adds events when you receive emailed invites, no matter who sends them. The only way to prevent this until now was to disable automatic event adding completely, forcing you to manually deal with each invite. 

Now, you can have the automatic invitations from folks you know while cutting off spam events like “Crypto meetup 9PM tonight” sent by some rando. Simply navigate to your Google Calendar settings, choose “Event Settings” and choose the “Add invitations to my calendar dropdown.” Then, select the option “Only if the sender is known.”

You’ll still receive spammy invites, but the new option lets you trash them before they ever see your calendar. Google notes that this may alert a sender that they’re not in your contacts list, but that seems to be the only potential downside. It’s a small but useful tweak, joining recent Google updates for Calendar, Gmail and other apps.