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Question

Securing my calendar

  • 10 November 2023
  • 1 reply
  • 459 views

How do I secure my calendar against spam? This week, someone who is unknown to me created a phone appointment on my calendar.  I deleted the event and the person made no attempt to contact me but it created some anxiety about the security of the app.

 

Hey @Ed27545 - I’m so sorry this happened. I know that it can be unsettling when someone random books with you.

At this time, we don't have a blocklist feature that will stop invitees from booking with you. That said, we’ve taken serious measures on the back end to mitigate spam events and abusive tactics and are always looking into more ways to prevent unwanted meetings. These measures include:

  • Improvements to reduce spam, including suspension of fraudulent accounts, preventing automated account creation, bot detection on our bookings, and–soon to come–invitee booking limits and blocklisting 
  • Hiring an entire team dedicated to Abuse, Trust & Safety, which is constantly working on evolving our abuse detection and response tools -
  • Maintaining an internal monitoring tool that detects and blocks spam messages generated from Calendly before they get sent. It does not catch everything, but it lowers how much spam gets out -
  • On-call teams that respond to Terms of Use violations and suspend bad accounts as soon as they are detected

If any event winds up on your Calendly that shouldn’t have, you can click the Report this event link either on the email notification you receive for the event or in the Scheduled Events tab in Calendly, as shown in the screenshot below. This cancels the meeting and reports the data to us, so we can continue to improve our abuse prevention measures:

 

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​Please note: Reporting an event does not block that invitee from booking with you in the future. However, it does add the invitee's email address to our logs which are being closely monitored by our Product team for future improvements around the issue of undesirable bookings.

In the meantime, depending on how you've shared your link, you may want to consider exploring the following options:

  • Changing the event URL, and sharing a new event link.
  • Alternatively, if you have shared your personal scheduling page- and not the event-specific link- you could make the event secret which would ensure it did not appear on your main scheduling page. Any invitees would need to use the event-specific link to access your booking page, which would only be provided by you.
  • In the future, I would also suggest sharing single-use links for specific event types. With single-use links, meeting links will expire once used and invitees will not be able to book another. Your event-type URL will never be exposed, preventing any unwanted repeat bookings on your calendar.

I hope this helps! This community topic might also prove helpful: 

 

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