Related to this bug, some time ago I started getting spam on my Google Calendar. Not sure if Google ever fixed it, but basically Google would automatically add events to your calendar when you got an invite in your email. Honestly, it's a nice feature; saves a couple clicks every time I get an invite. The bug is that it applied even if the email was spam. There was no workaround, other than disabling the feature completely. Quite a pain. And yes, just like this bug, you'd get lovely "eat my pussy" events popping up on your calendar and reminders.
It's used not just by spammers, but by sales reps, too.
Dell recently did this to about half a dozen people on my team. 'Q2 Budget Review', which sounds official, but is really a Dell rep trying to sell you junk that magically pops up on your calendar _even if you mark their message as spam_.
Another lovely Google feature that lasted for about 10sec. after I discovered it:
Booked a flight, got the receipt through Gmail. Google then auto-populated my calendar with the flights - fine. They also populated it with a hotel reservation, and a link saying I hadn't yet confirmed the reservation for Hilton. I was going to stay with family, w/no intention of staying in a hotel. I couldn't believe the blatant hijacking and spamming involved here from my private info - bad enough if they'd merely spammed a hotel advert for those dates.
Contacted Google, no way to turn it off without turning off the entire feature. Done. Permanently.
I couldn't believe anyone could think this was a good idea.
This hit a bunch of us about a year ago, maybe two years, I forget. It was incredibly annoying and made me completely stop relying on gmail for calendar stuff.
Google has very little incentive to fix the problem, and outsourced support personnel have even less incentive to care. The entire google forums read like passing the buck.
You just reminded me why I decoupled my google calendar from my iPhone calendar a few years ago. Just the other day I was thinking I’d like them up, but something made me feel like I shouldn’t...
I still get this. It was bad enough on my "sign up for shit" email address that I had to disconnect that account from my smartphone because it kept spamming me with notifications in my calendar to "earn $1500 a week working at home!"
I used to get these in Russian (I don't speak Russian and have no links with Russia). The worst part was I couldn't delete them from the Android app, which is like probably everyone else the only place I ever see my Google calendar. The functionality to delete them was hidden at calendar.google.com or somewhere I'd never had occasion to use. I don't get this spam any more, so I guess Google fixed it at some level.
I wish I could turn off the feature entirely, but I still occasionally get Russian spam events on my calendar. They also try to notify me at ~3am (fortunately I turn notifications completely off at night).
The emails themselves land in my spam folder... but no one said "hey, maybe calendar events shouldn't be created from the spam folder" at inception, so I guess it'll never be implemented.
I report them as spam when I get them, but I also discovered that I can't report calendar events as spam in the mobile app.
> Keep getting spam shared on an account I don't use much, but keep getting notifications. Not fun when my 9 yo son is on my phone and a notification pops up that someone shared "eat my pussy baby". Google needs to address this.
The mods on the support forums who make it sound like basic functionality missing from their product is your own fault for not submitting some kind of ticket deserve the gaslighting prize of the year for each of the last 5 years.
They don't even have an option to show you how much space folders take up, when they charge you based on space usage.
Wasting space in Google products is comically easy too, because it’s so “integrated” that you can have crap everywhere and may or may not know how to get rid of it.
I tried uploading a title image to my YouTube channel, and somehow doing so created an entire Google Photos account (even though the channel image is not a photo!). I dragged-and-dropped several replacement images because the YouTube UI for layout preview/cropping is so terrible that I didn’t get it right the first few times. Except the images are not replaced, they’re added, and there is nothing in YouTube to delete them. You have to go into Google Photos, and several screens later “delete” your “photos” of useless uploads. Except they’re not deleted, they’re in the “Trash”; etc. etc.
These are basic things that wouldn’t be stupidly hard to do if anyone there had any power over, or concern with, the full flow of using their products.
Google support forums are terrible. Every time there is a missing feature (I usually find it in Google Spreadsheet) or a bug, the corresponding entry in the support forum would be answered with some pretext of why said feature will never be supported.
Yeah I asked why I couldnt download old emails between when I started the Gmail Pro or whatever subscription and then subscription lapsed and the genius bootlickers on Support duty said "well its your fault for not continuing to pay, what do you expect?"
Of course the data is available to download if I pay, but my previous 2 years of payment didn't count. (mysterious)
Will literally never pay Google for anything ever again after that, its actually evil.
Compare that to the new service hey.com which claims you can download/export forever.
Fuck Google. Just bought a new MacBook Pro yesterday and I will never install or use any Google products on it ever.
When I read the recommended response in thread you linked, I just feel like they're acknowledging the feature doesn't exist and suggesting to use Send Feedback as a potential avenue to increase the chance that the feature gets implemented. It may be that important features are missing, but I don't think the forum mods can do anything about that and the reply didn't seem rude to me.
Question: We have a G Suite Enterprise account. We used to share documents with a contractor. They no longer contract with us. How do we remove that contractor from every shared document.
Answer 1: Run this report to get a list of every document shared with them. Manually visit each document and un-share it.
Answer 2: Our API docs are at...
FFS, Google. I really don't think this is that unusual of a request. I refuse to believe that we're the first company ever that wanted to remove people from our Google Drive. Why do you make it so difficult?
G Suite says Enterprise but doesn't actually do it.
For years, you had to turn of 2fa enforcement for the whole org, or do janky hacks with special groups and policy exceptions for groups to onboard new employees because they hadn't gotten around to a first time login flow that had a mandatory 2fa enrollment; instead they'd just prompt for the 2fa code you couldn't have setup.
There's no way to merge two separate G Suite accounts, in case your company merges with another company. You're just supposed to setup new users in the new org and close the old org account. Even more fun to be had if you want to keep the same usernames (I can't imagine the collosal pain it would be if you also wanted google handling the email during that transititon).
Oh yeah: there's no way to stop people from trying to setup consumer google accounts on your corporate domain. Most of those are spammers or idiots that won't get confirmed, but some of them are employees doing things wrong, and can confirm them, but then you have things like two accounts with the same name that are different because one is a g suite (but you can't register the domain for two different organizations, because three accounts with the same name would be too much)
It's recommended (and much easier) to share access to a folder instead of individual files. You can also use Google Groups instead of adding individual users. Google Team/Shared Drives has finally started to improve permissions and includes sharing with external emails as well.
Otherwise it's better to use something like Box.com which is actually designed for enterprise-level features including complex access controls and user management.
Generally, you would disable an account to revoke sharing. Are you sharing these outside your domain? That could be part of the problem. I agree there should be an easier way to remove sharing for everything for a particular user (and there may be). Have you checked out GAM?
This can be so confusing for non-tech literate people too. My mother asked me to help her, saying she was hacked because there was porn in her Google Drive.
It can be really difficult for non-power users to even understand why this is happening or what to do to fix this.
Tangential to this is that calendar/invite spam continues to be an issue as well. Want to trick someone into visiting a URL? Just send them a calendar invite and chances are they will click it.
What drives me crazy is that this will happen even if the email with the invite never hits your inbox and goes straight to spam. Outright insane to not patch that ASAP.
Just a simple option like "Allow just my contacts to share files with me". I lost so much time with all the spam and malware that is being sent to me just because my gmail account is so public ... :(
Spammers, scammers, and marketers are abusing every possible system to get eyeballs and it's moved beyond frustrating.
I've had to dump phone numbers due to SMS, voicemail, and phone call spam. My spam box on my e-mail address (not hosted at Google, but still) is littered with bogus calendar invites, fake invoices, file sharing attempts, and so on.
I'm a little surprised spammers aren't putting ad messages in fields that get logged in HTTP access logs just so admins will trip over them somehow.
IMHO Google drive is one of the worst service of Its kind in the market. Copying, moving duplicating files is as complex and blunt as it could be. Folder duplication doesn’t exist. I’m actually not surprised that sharing is still not fixed. Look at Meet. A service that only after being absolutely beaten by Zoom received some attention. They’re working on bringing Plus back in the form of Currents, but you still cannot stop people from sharing file with you in Google drive...
I fail to be surprised anymore at the lack of what should be OBVIOUS functionality in some of the largest functionality systems.
Whenever i think I might be stupid for missing what should be obvious functionality I submit a ticket to only realize that the functionality not only doesn't exist but somehow my really basic suggestion is a "unique" or "profound" idea.
Honestly who is hiring these product managers? Who is coming up with these features? Why are what should be no-brainer obvious functionality items missing?
Is there something about product management and design I don't understand? Why is it that you can't get notifications on group calendars or background images on Google docs or lots of other things I'm forgetting now that at the time I was like "wow I can't believe you can't do that"
Didn't google just make everyone jump through hoops on Youtube to ensure all content was safe for children because of COPPA? Does this violate that new law?
im a google one user. & will admit only pay, because it's a steal for the price. no other service offered 100gb for $20 a year.but yeah, google software quality is quite poor. wonder, why all those engineers doing leetcode interviews can't make quality products.
little side question, whats with these support forums that almost never have real employees answering but have community 'support specialists' that never answer the question and only tell you to use the feedback forms but beg for props on their answers. I don't get it.
Is it possible that someone could share files with someone that is elicit content in order to get them in trouble or to target children's accounts? Seems...like a problem.
I used to have everything google but have slowly moved away from their products because of this exact issue, because of a similar issue with the calendar invites, and because they just abandon their products. What's the point of releasing a brand new product and then releasing no updates? As a developer I love to try new software, but as a regular consumer I just need things to be reliable.
[+] [-] fpgaminer|5 years ago|reply
Thanks Google, you're the best /s
[+] [-] erichurkman|5 years ago|reply
Dell recently did this to about half a dozen people on my team. 'Q2 Budget Review', which sounds official, but is really a Dell rep trying to sell you junk that magically pops up on your calendar _even if you mark their message as spam_.
Dirty way to get by executive assistants, too.
[+] [-] toss1|5 years ago|reply
Booked a flight, got the receipt through Gmail. Google then auto-populated my calendar with the flights - fine. They also populated it with a hotel reservation, and a link saying I hadn't yet confirmed the reservation for Hilton. I was going to stay with family, w/no intention of staying in a hotel. I couldn't believe the blatant hijacking and spamming involved here from my private info - bad enough if they'd merely spammed a hotel advert for those dates.
Contacted Google, no way to turn it off without turning off the entire feature. Done. Permanently.
I couldn't believe anyone could think this was a good idea.
[+] [-] mjayhn|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Simulacra|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] wincy|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] malwarebytess|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] dmurray|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] ethagnawl|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] 4kevinking|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] aahhahahaaa|5 years ago|reply
I wish I could turn off the feature entirely, but I still occasionally get Russian spam events on my calendar. They also try to notify me at ~3am (fortunately I turn notifications completely off at night).
The emails themselves land in my spam folder... but no one said "hey, maybe calendar events shouldn't be created from the spam folder" at inception, so I guess it'll never be implemented.
I report them as spam when I get them, but I also discovered that I can't report calendar events as spam in the mobile app.
[+] [-] Wowfunhappy|5 years ago|reply
Oh. That's bad.
[+] [-] SanchoPanda|5 years ago|reply
They don't even have an option to show you how much space folders take up, when they charge you based on space usage.
https://support.google.com/drive/thread/3970069?hl=en
[+] [-] makecheck|5 years ago|reply
I tried uploading a title image to my YouTube channel, and somehow doing so created an entire Google Photos account (even though the channel image is not a photo!). I dragged-and-dropped several replacement images because the YouTube UI for layout preview/cropping is so terrible that I didn’t get it right the first few times. Except the images are not replaced, they’re added, and there is nothing in YouTube to delete them. You have to go into Google Photos, and several screens later “delete” your “photos” of useless uploads. Except they’re not deleted, they’re in the “Trash”; etc. etc.
These are basic things that wouldn’t be stupidly hard to do if anyone there had any power over, or concern with, the full flow of using their products.
[+] [-] xtracto|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] mcny|5 years ago|reply
iirc unlike Dropbox, files shared with you do not count against your quota on Google Drive as long as you don't add it to your drive.
[+] [-] arthurcolle|5 years ago|reply
Of course the data is available to download if I pay, but my previous 2 years of payment didn't count. (mysterious)
Will literally never pay Google for anything ever again after that, its actually evil.
Compare that to the new service hey.com which claims you can download/export forever.
Fuck Google. Just bought a new MacBook Pro yesterday and I will never install or use any Google products on it ever.
[+] [-] knolan|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] mey|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] perennate|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] throwawaysea|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] varjag|5 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] kstrauser|5 years ago|reply
Question: We have a G Suite Enterprise account. We used to share documents with a contractor. They no longer contract with us. How do we remove that contractor from every shared document.
Answer 1: Run this report to get a list of every document shared with them. Manually visit each document and un-share it.
Answer 2: Our API docs are at...
FFS, Google. I really don't think this is that unusual of a request. I refuse to believe that we're the first company ever that wanted to remove people from our Google Drive. Why do you make it so difficult?
[+] [-] toast0|5 years ago|reply
For years, you had to turn of 2fa enforcement for the whole org, or do janky hacks with special groups and policy exceptions for groups to onboard new employees because they hadn't gotten around to a first time login flow that had a mandatory 2fa enrollment; instead they'd just prompt for the 2fa code you couldn't have setup.
There's no way to merge two separate G Suite accounts, in case your company merges with another company. You're just supposed to setup new users in the new org and close the old org account. Even more fun to be had if you want to keep the same usernames (I can't imagine the collosal pain it would be if you also wanted google handling the email during that transititon).
Oh yeah: there's no way to stop people from trying to setup consumer google accounts on your corporate domain. Most of those are spammers or idiots that won't get confirmed, but some of them are employees doing things wrong, and can confirm them, but then you have things like two accounts with the same name that are different because one is a g suite (but you can't register the domain for two different organizations, because three accounts with the same name would be too much)
[+] [-] jfaat|5 years ago|reply
You're definitely not the first company to want this!
[+] [-] manigandham|5 years ago|reply
Otherwise it's better to use something like Box.com which is actually designed for enterprise-level features including complex access controls and user management.
[+] [-] cientifico|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] techntoke|5 years ago|reply
https://webapps.stackexchange.com/questions/52093/see-all-sh...
Generally, you would disable an account to revoke sharing. Are you sharing these outside your domain? That could be part of the problem. I agree there should be an easier way to remove sharing for everything for a particular user (and there may be). Have you checked out GAM?
https://github.com/jay0lee/GAM
[+] [-] agundy|5 years ago|reply
It can be really difficult for non-power users to even understand why this is happening or what to do to fix this.
[+] [-] ethbro|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] schoolornot|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] aahhahahaaa|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Simulacra|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] cbm-vic-20|5 years ago|reply
(/s: not condoning doxxing here)
[+] [-] mariocesar|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] techsupporter|5 years ago|reply
I've had to dump phone numbers due to SMS, voicemail, and phone call spam. My spam box on my e-mail address (not hosted at Google, but still) is littered with bogus calendar invites, fake invoices, file sharing attempts, and so on.
I'm a little surprised spammers aren't putting ad messages in fields that get logged in HTTP access logs just so admins will trip over them somehow.
[+] [-] kwijibob|5 years ago|reply
I do notice Spam occasionally in the 'shared with me' menu - but it seems to get cleaned up.
I already have all 99% notifications turned off in apps.
Sounds like the real annoying part is getting the notification with the spammy sexual titles.
If you didn't get notifications then likely the spam detection would delete before you ever noticed it in your 'Shared with Me' menu.
Android needs to default to opt-in notifications like on IOS.
[+] [-] ramosu|5 years ago|reply
I've been living with another issue since 2011: https://issuetracker.google.com/issues/35889152
[+] [-] thisbrt|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] moandcompany|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] rexreed|5 years ago|reply
Whenever i think I might be stupid for missing what should be obvious functionality I submit a ticket to only realize that the functionality not only doesn't exist but somehow my really basic suggestion is a "unique" or "profound" idea.
Honestly who is hiring these product managers? Who is coming up with these features? Why are what should be no-brainer obvious functionality items missing?
Is there something about product management and design I don't understand? Why is it that you can't get notifications on group calendars or background images on Google docs or lots of other things I'm forgetting now that at the time I was like "wow I can't believe you can't do that"
[+] [-] ProAm|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] dzonga|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] rnotaro|5 years ago|reply
I'm using GSuite for my private domain after having too much reputations / emails reaching spams issues.
Somehow it was getting worst over the years and 1+ of 10 emails were ending into spam. :(
[+] [-] nikanj|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] phendrenad2|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] tcmeggs|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] dawnerd|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] partiallypro|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] ibdf|5 years ago|reply