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Wednesday, July 24, 2019

Daily Battles: How to get rid of unwanted items in your Google Calendar

If you use Google Calendar, you probably noticed recently that a lot of extra events just start to pop up in your calendar, such as hotels you reserved and flights you booked, meeting invitation you received, or worse, notifications on the prize money you just won with bogus phishing links embedded such as this one below:



So what is going on?

This is actually the results of Google AI trying to be smart and convenient for you by scanning your emails and then automatically adding items to your calendar. However, Google messed up by allowing spam invitations sent to your to also show up in your Google Calendar even though your Gmail correctly classified it as spam and shoved it into the spam folder.

On the other hand, it might be convenient for some people to have their travel itinerary automatically inserted into their calendars based on email confirmation they receive, some people might not want that at all! And guess what, I am one of them!!

My wife works as a travel agent, and she sometimes forwards me emails containing hotel reservations and flight info so I can track the credit card charges. Google AI just automatically assumed that I was traveling and then spammed the heck out of my calendar with all these events I have no interest tracking. And it would have been better if I got an email asking me if I want to opt into such "smart" service. But nope, Google just decided to make that the default.

Whining aside, how can you turn these things off and get life back to normal? Let me show you:

Go to Google Calendar and then click the gear icon to get into settings. Then uncheck "Automatically add events from Gmail to my calendar" under Events from Gmail.


Next go to Event settings and change the selection under Automatically add invitations to "Yes, but don't send event notification unless I have responded".


That should disable the evil Google AI from trying to determine your calendar for you!

Moving on to my next battles!!


BTW: The easiest way to remember my blog address is http://lanny.lannyland.com

1 comment:

  1. Anonymous2:05 PM

    I don't like google calendar it's way to slow!

    ReplyDelete