Not long after Thanksgiving, spammy ads for Ugg boots started incessantly popping up in my calendar. How annoying! How violating! Was my personal calendar breached, I wondered? Luckily, it turns out that that these ads are just old-fashioned, annoying spam. Instead of a normal blast email, the spammers are basically sending out invitations for a meeting or a conference call. Don’t make my initial mistake of simply rejecting one of these spam invitations: acknowledging them might let the spammer know that your email address is a valid one. Instead, follow these instructions to get rid of these annoying ads forever.

First, block any new ads by turning off notifications in iCloud:

1) Go to www.icloud.com and sign in to your account.

2) Click the calendar.

3) Click the settings ‘cog’ icon in the lower left of your screen, and select “advanced.”

4) Under “invitations,” change the radio button to email instead of in-app notifications.

Second, you’ll want to delete the annoying ads that are already in your calendar:

1) In the Calendar app, Go to File —> New Calendar. Give the calendar a name like “spam.”

2) Double-click the spam and, using the color-coded calendar icon, change to the new “spam” option.

3) Now delete that “spam” calendar by right-clicking and selecting delete.

That should do it!