Google Calendar gives up scruples, creates events from random Gmail messages

We all get spam and it’s challenging tokeep spam out of a Gmail inbox. It’s bad. But the worst kind of spam happens to spill over into your calendar, populating your schedule with random events based on all the newsletters and marketing content you receive. No, really, it’s true: apparently, the crafty integration that letsGoogle Calendarautomatically create events based on certain hooks in your Gmail messages has gone haywire for a number of users.

People have posted floods of all-day events based on the messages they’ve received in Gmail that have also gone onto Google Calendar. These events seemingly began popping up on Thursday and have continued into today.

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Our competing friends at9to5Googlesuggest that users may find turning off the integration helpful for the time being. Head to Google Calendar > Settings > Events from Gmail to find the toggle for each account you’re logged into.

It’s definitely not so helpful if you’re booking tickets for pretty much anything in the next few days. For the most part, Calendar’s Gmail integration has done a good job of picking up on appointments and reservations, then automatically creating events for them with all the proper timing and location details attached.

The Gmail logo on top of a wall of blurred SPAM cans

For its part, the Google Calendar team is suggesting that users report problem events individually.

Which is great and all, but given the rather complete nature of this failure, we think someone at Google Workspace needs to just dig in and find the one switch to flip or knot to untie or fringle to frangle and get this bug squashed. Well, as long as someone’s on duty, that is.

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