How to stop spam invitations adding themselves to your Google Calendar
By default on older accounts, Google Calendar adds any invitation sent to your email address straight onto your calendar — whether or not you know the sender. Spammers use this to plant fake "prize" or "payment due" events with links in them. One setting stops it: invitations from strangers stay in your inbox as emails, and only appear on the calendar if you accept them. This guide covers the desktop browser version of Google Calendar.
What you'll need: A Google Account, and a desktop or laptop browser open to calendar.google.com.
Open Google Calendar
Go to calendar.google.com and sign in if you aren't already.
Open the settings menu
Click the Settings icon (a gear) in the top-right corner, then click Settings in the menu that drops down.
Go to Event settings
In the menu down the left-hand side, under General, click Event settings. The page scrolls to that section.
Find the invitations setting
Look for the dropdown labelled Add invitations to my calendar. It has three choices: From everyone, Only if the sender is known, and When I respond to the invitation in email.
Choose "Only if the sender is known"
Click the dropdown and select Only if the sender is known. A sender counts as known if they're in your Google Contacts, in the same organisation as you on a work or school account, or someone you've emailed or exchanged invitations with before.
The change saves on its own. There is no save button on this page.
Go back to your calendar
Click the back arrow in the top-left corner of the settings page. From now on, an invitation from someone you don't know arrives as an email only. It appears on your calendar if you click Yes or Maybe in that email, and not otherwise.
Remove any spam events already on the calendar
The setting stops new spam. It doesn't remove events that are already there, so find each one and click it to open its details. Click the Options icon (three vertical dots) and choose Report as spam. The event disappears and Google is told about the sender.
Variations
Choose When I respond to the invitation in email instead at step 5. Nothing lands on your calendar — not even from a colleague or a family member — until you click Yes or Maybe in the email. This is the strictest option and suits people who get very few genuine invitations. If you accept a lot of meetings, it means an extra click for each one.
The same setting exists in the Google Calendar app on Android, iPhone and iPad. Open the app, tap the Menu icon (three horizontal lines) in the top-left, tap Settings, then General, and look for Add invitations to my calendar. It's the same account-wide setting, so changing it in one place changes it everywhere.
Occasionally a spammer shares a whole calendar with you instead of inviting you to one event. That shows up as an extra entry under Other calendars in the left-hand panel. Hover over it, click the × that appears to its right, and the calendar and all its events disappear from your view.
Troubleshooting
This is the setting working as designed: the sender isn't in your contacts and you haven't dealt with them before, so the invitation went to your inbox only. Open the email and click Yes to add the event. To stop it happening again with that person, add them to your Google Contacts — after that, their invitations go straight onto the calendar.
On a work or school account (Google Workspace), the administrator can decide which of the three options are available and can set one for everyone. If you can't change it, the administrator is the only person who can.
That's expected. The setting controls your calendar, not your email, so the invitations still arrive as messages. In Gmail, open one and click Report spam (the exclamation mark icon above the message). Gmail learns from that and filters the rest. If the spam comes from one sender repeatedly, use Block in the sender's menu as well.
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