Apple iCloud Calendar finally gets a "Report Junk" button

Apple's cloud-based calendar solution has finally caught up to modern times. Or at least modern e-mail times. Just as any e-mail service worth its salt has an option to flag an e-mail as spam, now the iCloud Calendar finally has such a button as well. At least iCloud on the web. And it only took a mass spamming incident and dozens of vocal Apple users before Apple finally got its act together to roll out such a feature, a bit more than a month after users have started making noise.

The advantage to having a calendar on the cloud, especially one associated with an e-mail address, is that you can send and receive event notifications and invitations to dates that matter to you. At least that's the theory. Through reasons still undisclosed, less scrupulous individuals seem to have discovered a hole in Apple's wall that allowed them to send massive event invitations to random strangers. The calendar equivalent of e-mail spam.

Normally, that would have been easy to resolve. Unfortunately, iCloud Calendar, whether on the web or in apps, didn't have a "Report Spam" option. It only allowed users to accept or decline an invitation. The problem with the latter option is that declining an event would have alerted the spammer that the e-mail is in active use and, therefore, susceptible to more spam.

The proper solution would have been to mark an invitation as spam without alerting spammers of any activity. And Apple finally has implemented that, with one important caveat for now. The Report Junk option is currently only available for iCloud Calendar on the web. Apps still only have Accept or Decline. That said, it will probably only be a matter of time before that rolls out as well. So until then, if you get any junk invites, you'll have to hop on to a web browser to clean it out. And, yes, you also have an option to unmark an invite as junk. Just in case you went a bit trigger happy with the new feature.

VIA: 9to5Mac