This is going to be a rant. If you aren't interested, hit the back button now.
I am increasingly being spammed in my calendar. People invite me to things I have no interest in attending by spamming my calendar. And because email is already a challenge to keep up with, I often don't see the email notifications of those calendar spams and they stay in my calendar and the folks I work with on my calendar see them and get confused.
I don't know about all of you, but my online/mobile calendar is sacred. It's my schedule and a number of folks including me and the Gotham Gal work carefully on it to make it accurate, clean, and well organized.
When stuff pops into it that nobody knows anything about, it's a nuisance and not just to me but a bunch of people.
But it gets worse. Last week I got a calendar spam that said "Reply" and the message was "reply to my email now". Now some folks might think that is funny but I did not. First of all, I am not obligated to reply to any unsolicited email. I try like hell to do as best I can with all of those inbound emails, but I've been clear many times here and elsewhere that I can't and won't get to all of them. The idea that someone is using my calendar to get a message to me is annoying and upsetting. And they did themselves no good because all they did was piss me off royally.
So here is a request. If you want me to attend something, please send me an email. We will process that request through any number of ways, including a direct reply from me. If a time and place is agreed upon via email, we will then accept a calendar invite. Otherwise, they are unwanted spam that helps nobody.
I do the same thing with others. I would never and don't send calendar invites without first clearing them via email. I think that's basic decency in action.
