spam Archives - Carl Setzer

Phishing Calendar Invites

October 30, 2025October 30, 2025 Carl Setzer1 Comment

Well, it’s been an interesting few days in the land of spam and phishing. Yesterday I wrote about a spam email I received, along with dozens of others that’s gotten a bit silly. Today I noticed an invite in one of my company calendars, “Your order Estimate OYYE03661 has been queued”:

I’ve seen these before, but not in MY calendar.

So, my first thought was “when did my calendar get changed to “add invitations to my calendar” to “From Everyone”. Needless to say, that should NOT be the default. EVER!

So, if you need to know how to change this in Google, here you go:

Go the gear icon at the top-right of your calendar:

Then click “settings”

Scroll down to Event Settings, the “Add invitations to my calendar”

Then change to “When I respond to the invitation in email”

I’m also going to recommend unchecking the “Show events automatically created by Gmail in my calendar”

Anyway, we need to stay vigilant against fraudsters. This is one annoying game of whack-a-mole.

Fraud, Spam, Bulk Email, and Other Joys

October 29, 2025October 29, 2025 Carl Setzer4 Comments

Less than 1/2 hour ago, I received a mess in my inbox. Someone sent an email out to an unknown quantity of email recipients with no subject and the message body stating “Who are you”. To me, this screams phishing. Well, to (currently) 11 people, it didn’t. There were silly responses (“I contain mutitudes”) to “Take me off this email”. One person did reply stating “you are all replying to a fraud email…stop replying…” Which is the most useful message on there. But, really, not that helpful. So, just mark them as spam and move along. Replying lets the scammers know that a) this email is valid and b) you are somewhat gullible and, therefore, more susceptible to phishing scams. And, of course, replying all to these sorts of things floods other people’s inboxes.

So, please, just don’t. I guess if you feel called to troll scammers, just reply to the original sender. I’ve got other things to do than manage this junk in my inbox.