Following on from Apple's acknowledgment of the rising levels of spam calendar invites, Apple has quietly launched a new feature to help fight the spam. It can be found in the online calendar component of iCloud, and allows users to report junk invites.
Apple acknowledged the problem not long after Black Friday, which saw a rise in the use of this spam vector. "We are sorry that some of our users are receiving spam calendar invitations," Apple said at the time "We are actively working to address this issue by identifying and blocking suspicious senders and spam in the invites being sent."
Having the iCloud servers start to recognise the spam was the easiest solution - and keeping it server-side meant there was no immediate need to roll out any public facing changes - but to catch the spam the servers had to have spam messages to learn from. No doubt Apple's engineers picked out a representative sample, but as spam evolves there would need to be a better alert system.
Which is where the 'report junk' button comes in. Not only does it give a user a clear option to choose to dismiss a spam message, it also allows spam messages to be recognised at an almost industrial level across all of the iCloud ecosystem.
While this button is welcome and no doubt be used by desk-bound users who live in Apple's cloud, the real value will come when iOS users can mark spam as it comes in on their devices. No doubt the web-based button will test the code and server software to ensure a smooth process before the Calendar app on your iPhone or iPad is updated with a similar option at the next update to iOS.
The calendar spam issue may have been lying dormant for years, but Apple's reaction to the surge in its popularity with the spammers is welcome.
Now read how the iCloud calendar spam issue was first reported...
