Google Calendar has a Brand New, “Known Senders” Feature

Google Calendar is an easy way to keep track of your appointments and add reminders. The "known senders" option that was recently added to Google Calendar is designed to make it simpler to prevent unwanted messages from filling up your calendar. If you turn on this option, it will prevent invitations from persons you aren't familiar with from being added automatically to your Calendar.

‘Known Sender’

Thanks to the new functionality known as 'Known Senders,' Google Calendar will only automatically add invitations from persons who are already in your contacts list, people with whom you have communicated via Workspace, and users who work for your organization or firm.

In the case you have previously used Google Calendar, you will know that Google automatically adds events such as clone phone meetings to your calendar depending on the emailed invitations you get. This feature is available to users of both the desktop and mobile versions of Google Calendar.

If you throw up the floodgates and let Google Calendar to add events that have been received by "everyone," you run the risk of your calendar being cluttered with spurious and inconvenient events. There is a fix for this, but Google has made it somewhat hard. It requires stopping automated event addition entirely, which means that you have to react to each invite individually.

Google had said that it will address this issue in 2019, and the technology giant has finally implemented a remedy to the problem. You can activate the new filter by going to the settings menu of your Google Calendar and selecting the Events Settings option from there. Select Only if the sender is known from the selection menu that appears after selecting the Add invites to my calendar option found here.

However, Google claims that this option would not prevent you from getting spam invitations in your inbox. Simply by choosing to ignore such invitations, you may prevent them from being added to your Calendar. Google warns users on one of its help pages that selecting this option might make it obvious to a sender that you do not include them in your list of contacts (if that matters to you).

It is worth mentioning that this is not the only recent update that Google has made to its Workspace applications that is very minor yet beneficial. The previous month saw Google put out an updated version of Gmail as well as make some changes to Calendar invitations that made them simpler to read. A security flaw that allowed users to put spammy or abusive shared folders on the Drives of other users was fixed in an upgrade that was released the previous year.