So, another complaint about Google Calendar: how do I remove contacts' birthdays from my calendar? I have hundreds of contacts -- almost all are coworkers and almost none of which I care that it's their birthday. Many of their birthdays show up on my Google Calendar. I don't want to remove the showing of birthdays. I want to remove the showing of individual peoples' birthdays.
Even more so, I'm sorry to say I have contacts with friend(s) that died... I don't necessarily want to remove them from my contact list, but the (automated) birthday notification feels... unseemly... :-/
This would not be true of a manual one because it expresses the action intentionally, whereas an automated one is kinda like an awkward stranger being like hey it's their birthday today!
So... You don't actually care but you're annoyed that Google calendar makes you choose between admitting to not caring and getting 3 birthday notifications every day that you won't do anything about and don't want to be reminded about?
If you have the Google Calendar app: tap on Settings in the side bar, scroll down to birthdays, tap on your email account and tick "Do not include birthdays"
If you don't care about almost all of them, you should probably just make your own calendar with birthdays of people you do care about. Kinda blacklist/whitelist.
My GCal bday annoyance: my calendar marks 100+ birthdays on the one single day (many other birthday reminders are correct). Wonder where the data got funked along the line or if a default Birthdate got set somewhere
My biggest complaint with the automatic events has always been the inability to treat them as my own events. If I want to make any changes to the event, I have to copy it to my calendar. Doing so means there are now two versions of the same event, and the one I copied will not automatically update if there is a change. I've seen the automatic events update when, for example, my itinerary changes.
I also hate that reminders do not get shared with other events and are google calendar exclusive. This means I can't use a third party calendar app on my phone if I want to use reminders.
Ugh. Google Calendar reminders are handled perfectly on Android. You get a notification, and it stays there every time you look at your phone until you clear it. On iOS, even with Google Calendar installed, you get the notification one time (as if for a one-time event) and then it disappears into the app.
I assume iOS Reminders work better than this, but I'm dependent on Google Calendar. I have not figured out a workaround for notifications since switching and I am now a less reliable person.
Why does the Google Calendar app not manage iOS reminder notifications as it does on Android? Have I horked a notification setting unawares?
If they were worried about the underlying problem of merge conflicts, the easiest solution would be the creation of a private notes field for any event shared with you. That way any event updates wouldn't collide with personal notes and you wouldn't need to duplicate events.
Yea.. try having a short (5 character) @ gmail.com address.. For _years_ I have dealt with this issue. Every time I seem to finally get things to not automatically get added I get hit with another round of lazy google engineers that don't add a UI option to disable this silliness.
Though, due to the short address I also get hundreds of legit calendar invites that were just sent to the wrong people. I swear I know the whereabouts of half the people in the country with names either starting with, or ending with that combination. =/
Same issue here; yoga memberships, rugby clubs, password resets for their real email address. I haven’t had a bank password reset come through yet, but it is a matter of time. Some of my namesakes, meh, they’re not so smart. Thankfully I don’t use Google calendar, or I could see it being a real mess because many of those emails are invites from other people who either got it wrong, or the namesake is handing out the address he wishes he had.
I have a very short email, just 3 letters @outlook and I get stuff all the time from people signing up to things. I found that the only way to stop the constant stream of update and emails or whatever is the moment I get an email about "your new account" I go to the site, reset the password to something random and then unsubscribe from all messages.
I have the same problem. I've thought about sending out Christmas Cards to all the random people that have revealed to me a little too much information by not minding their email address.
Somebody misprinted a flier for a local town meeting.. the email was SUPPOSED to be congresman.<myname>@gmail.com but instead it got cut off to just <myname>@gmail.com. I started getting a wave of hate mail asking how I could hate firemen so much! At first I couldn't figure out what was happening but eventually I devised that the town had gone broke (this was 2009) and needed to lay off a bunch of workers, including firemen.
A coworker convinced me to try and see what the most outlandish thing I could say and still be believed was. Some of the toppers:
1) I don't know why we need firemen. My has has never even caught fire!
2) My wife cheated on me once with a fireman and now I am getting my revenge!
3) I believe in privatizing fire service, when the need arises the market will find a solution!
#1 could sound like a challenge to the wrong people. Please be careful.
I toohave received emails intended for others. One time I was included ina group email which kept going back and forth and they would not stop emailing me after asking several times. I just started replying with ridiculous answers to the questions and they finally stopped. So I don't blame you, just be careful.
Really? You must know someone from the original gmail team because really short addresses (< 6 chars i believe) were not supported specifically for that reason (anyone who got an exception instantly regretted it). Maybe they relaxed it later on...
I also made spam@gmail.com and basically broke gmail (too many emails to a single destination for the system to handle in those days).. but I got an AWESOME trove of spam reports to use as testing data! =)
Mine's that length and of similar context. They should used my address to train filters. Over the years, the spam detection has gotten much better. I probably get a dozen a day that make it into my inbox now. It used to be tens or more. I think the smart labels really helped.
On the plus side, I have an account on everything.
The new design is pretty awful too. Material Design has accessibility problems for people with motion sensitivity. Everything animates, even if you aren't supposed to be looking at it at the time. Sudden movement can cause nausea, especially if there's an initial delay and/or parallax effect. Many people are complaining about it.
There needs to be more aesthetic restraint. Animation should be a very thin layer of icing on the cake, not 50% of the cake. "Animation spam" would be an accurate term.
Could you please provide a source for the anti-Material dialogue from an accessibility perspective? I have been suspicious that this might be the case, with Google and other companies.
I have visual-motion sensitivity, and plan to write some articles on some of the problems with recent animation trends. I'm also planning on creating browser extensions that disable CSS animations and other spammy problems with UI design.
It's really difficult for me to use Google's new designs. I switched to Thunderbird/Lightning until I can find a Google Calendar replacement. I removed most apps from my phone and turned off most notifications, because it's too stressful to use it. There needs to be a low-animation setting.
Designers should be asking themselves, "how do I make this UI functionality clear with the absolute minimum of animation?"
At least on Android you can disable most animation in the Developer Settings app. I'm guessing how much that affects individual apps varies wildly, however.
I set three options for animation to 0/disabled in there. Phone felt much faster but it took me a couple weeks to realise why Blackberry's swishy "you're plugged in, want to fast charge? or transfer data?" semicircle popup was no longer appearing.
No way to transfer data without reenabling one of the options.
I'm pretty livid that Google Voice followed in the same web UX design. I loved the old Google Voice web UI. The new one? It's significantly slower and uses more resources. I don't see where it improved anything whatsoever.
To add on to the design issues: I routinely get calendar invites which show up as a calendar invite in Gmail, but I cannot accept or add them to my calendar except on the web. This is using the Gmail app. I can’t accept them at all in Inbox - even on the web, so I have to go to to GMail (web) to accept them. It really feels like calendar invites are a secondary thing for Gmail, which really strikes me as odd since Google Calendar is so great.
Thank you for posting this. This issue happened to me for the first time last week - I thought my account had been hacked. I had no idea how a rouge spammy event got added to my calendar. I ended up resetting my password and spending over an hour pouring over other aspects of my account to make sure nothing else was compromised. It's mind boggling to think this could have been because of a spam message.
Wow - I spoke on this exact topic at M3AAWG today. We're working on trying to get the email abuse teams and calendar teams at companies working together. As a member of both M3AAWG and CalConnect, it's particularly interesting to me.
I fell victim to this spam, and it was incredibly difficult to get rid of, due to bugs on Google's side. Simply unchecking the box didn't seem to make the invites go away, and I was unable to delete them. Eventually, I used the GCal API to go in and blow everything away. Ugh.
I got one of these for the first time a week or so ago. I don't think the spam was originally spam-filtered. Really crazy that they will let anyone who knows your email address put events on your calendar.
Speaking of crazy dumb, the thing that recognizes your flight emails and tells you to go to your flight is nice... for your flight. But it's common at least for me for people coming into town to just forward me their flight emails. Google picks those up and assumes they're my flights, and keeps sending me notifications about getting to "my" flight from somewhere in another state to the city I'm in now. I'm amazed that they haven't put in even a teeny bit of effort to solve that one.
> By default, don't automatically import events from Gmail. If I agree to attend the event, then add it.
Not sure about this one. Even without having accepted it I might want to be aware of what's going on. At least in my case I've found it useful in the past. Plus, you are assuming you'll accept the invite from Gmail, but other people might do that from Google Calendar.
I guess you don't have a problem with other people signing up for services with your email address.
I have a <first-initial><middle-initial><last-name>@gmail and several people like to sign up for deliveries and airlines using my email address.
I get to know ALL about Richard's flight to Boston, or Rachel's Adult Themed party night, or recently, how Reggie sent $40 worth of flowers to his wife, but $120 to his mistress.
They've certainly put time into trying to fix it. Whether their spam detection algorithms are good enough to block out invites like these, I have no idea.
Unless I'm mistaken, I really don't believe it's an issue with the spec. There's nothing in iCal (RFC 5545) that says you have to take iCal objects attached to emails and automatically include them in the calendar. In fact, iCal servers are simply configured to accept the xml requests and distribute a list of VEVENT objects (among others) for display. They aren't inherently connected to a working inbox.
My guess is they have loose rules around auto-adding iCal attachments detected in IMAP/Mime messages. It's notoriously difficult to get email and calendars working. There's a reason ActiveSync is so damn expensive.
Yeah - At FastMail we default to only adding if it comes from someone in your addressbook. You can reduce it to just an addressbook group, or open to the world if you feel like living dangerously.
I've never experienced this as a form of spam myself but I have noticed that some times events will get added to my calendar without me seeing the email message. I'll see something on my calendar and think "I don't remember this..." but if I had just seen it in my inbox, I would have marked it Done and remembered it, even if it was way in the future.
100% agree with this post. I get these spam messages all the time and the worst part is it generates a push notification on my mobile. I see the fix to turn it off, but I rely on the functionality of events being added from my other genuine contacts in my Gmail. It should totally be from contacts on your contact list only.
i just wish even gmail would prevent spam. for the past month or so, i have been getting increasing amounts of spam hitting my inbox. i wonder what google is good at anymore besides making their products worse. youtube has been nothing but a study of poor usability design.
I keep getting added to MLM and Pyramid scams, someone just enters my email a few times a week at midnight or 3am so they must be from another time zone. Is there a way to block that user?
I like auto adding, but not of spam. I like the way it finds my flights etc, where it doesnt give me a choice. But adding the spam events every day for a yesr is obviously stupid.
