Why am I suddenly receiving spam calendar invitations/appointments in Outlook (Microsoft 365 Family).

Hi Chad,

Thanks for contacting us and sorry for the inconveniences, Spam calendar invitations are a type of unwanted email that try to trick you into accepting a meeting request or clicking on a malicious link. They can clutter your calendar and expose you to phishing or malware attacks. They are not related to your virus scan or your Outlook settings, but rather to the sender's ability to bypass the spam filters.

There are some steps you can take to prevent and remove spam calendar invitations in Outlook:

• Do not open, accept, or decline the invitations. This will only confirm your email address to the spammers and encourage them to send more. Instead, delete them from your inbox or move them to the junk folder.
• Create a rule to automatically delete or move to junk any meeting invitations from unknown or suspicious senders. You can do this in Outlook.com's settings: Settings (gear icon) > View all Outlook settings > Junk email.
• Turn off the option to show event summaries from email on your calendar. You can do this in Outlook.com's settings: Settings (gear icon) > View all Outlook settings > Calendar > Events from email. From there, you can choose "Don't show event summaries in email or on my calendar" for each type of invite.
• Report the spam invitations as phishing or junk to Microsoft. You can do this by selecting the invitation in your inbox and clicking on the "Report" button at the top. This will help Microsoft improve their spam filters and protect other users.

I hope this helps!

Regards, Sola

I think you didn't understand what is happening. There are no messages or invites that appear in my inbox to categorize as junk. The appointments are going directly to calendar and have to be opened in order to delete them.

So far they are just annoying but whoever is doing this could just as easily send some nasty malware that activates when the appointment is opened.

I suspect that Microsoft changed and made you accept the EULA (agreement) that said we will no longer filter anything and let it hit you directly, unless of course you signed for 365 and paid monthly subscription. It is not in their interest to prevent spam.

US and EU needs to hold mail service providers accountable to ensuring that the platform is reasonably free of SPAM and Phishing. Microsoft is not going to self regulate themselves - it is not in their interest.

Unfortunately, I think spammers have just found the latest "weak link" and are exploiting it until Microsoft figures out how to put a stop to it. I will say that now, when I report an email as phishing or junk, it removes the calendar entry. I hope they come out with a solution quickly. The calendar notifications are annoying, and I really can't turn them off unless I want to miss out on my own calendar events.

Thank you for the reply. Do your instructions apply to Outlook 365? For instance, I see Junk Mail Settings, but not the options you describe ("Turn off the option to show event summaries from email on your calendar.")

I've had my hotmail account for 24 years now and I've never gotten so much spam in my email or calendar as I have the past couple of months. I have been fighting this calendar issue for over a month now. I can get up to 8 or 10 of these "invites" a day. It has rendered my calendar useless. The spam has also taken over my email account and I am deleting anywhere between 40 and 60 spam emails daily. I have marked them as junk/phishing/spam etc. but they keep coming back. Microsoft used to be good at keeping spam in the junk folders but not anymore. I'm done with outlook / hotmail. I have moved my calendar items already and I will be moving my actual email related accounts over to my gmail account.