Spammers invade Google calendar

Google's support forums have seen a steady rise in complaints that unexpected 'spam appointments' are showing up in Google Calendar -- and predictably, that old favourite the Nigerian scam looks like it's to blame.

Complaints from users that spam appointments have appeared in their personal calendars have risen steadily over the last week. "I am very happy to inform you about my success in getting that fund," one typical entry reads. "Now, I want you to contact my secretary on the information below."

As with most Nigerian scams (so-called because of their initial pre-Internet prevalence in Nigeria, although these days a wide range of countries are cited), the main aim is to gather information for use in fraudulent transactions, ranging from demands for small processing payments before receiving a fortune to cleaning out bank accounts.

"The e-mails are personalised, with a different link sent to each recipient, making URL-based filtering harder," security developer BitDefender said in a note on the new problem. "The fact that these things are being spammed in huge numbers is a bit odd -- usually there is a testing phase, to evaluate the response rate," said BitDefender CTO Bogdam Dumitru. None of which helps very much if you have to delete a bunch of stupid appointments from your calendar.

One of Google's selling points for its email service has always been its efficient blocking of spam. The calendar option, still technically in beta despite launching in April 2006, doesn't seem to be living up to those standards. "It's very disappointing that the default behaviour seems to be acceptance of an appointment," one user commented.

"The team hates spam just as much as you guys do and we're working hard to keep it out of Google Calendar," one Google employee wrote on the company's support forum.

Google does offer a link to report spam problems on its calendar, and has suggested a workaround that can help reduce some instances of calendar spamming and unwanted notifications. Selecting '"No, only show invitations to which I have responded" under Google Calendar's settings will stop notifications for unwanted events appearing, though it won't necessarily block the spam in the first place.

We can't decide whether this is an ingenious new twist on one of society's most annoying problems or further dramatic evidence of humanity's spell-check-driven plunge towards utter stupidity. We'd like to think that nobody would be stupid enough to act on an appointment that they didn't add to their own calendar, but then there are plainly plenty of people who believe that corrupt African government officials have nothing better to do than contact random Westerners seeking to offer them an easy million bucks or so.