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Understanding Google’s Anti-Spam Policy
Understanding Google’s Anti-Spam Policy

Learn who is affected by Google's anti-spam policy and best practices for reducing negative impact potentially caused by this policy.

Ashley Young avatar
Written by Ashley Young
Updated over 4 months ago

Google Calendar has introduced an anti-spam policy to protect Google users from unwanted content in their calendars. This new policy affects all scheduling tools, including Doodle.

Happily, most Doodle organizers and participants will not be affected by Google’s anti-spam policy.

However, this policy has the potential to impact a subset of Doodle event organizers and a subset of their participants. In this article, we will discuss:

  • What does Google’s anti-spam policy do?

  • Who is not impacted by this policy

  • Who is impacted by this policy

  • Best practices that you can follow to ensure that Google’s anti-spam policy does not negatively impact your next event

What does Google’s anti-spam policy do?

As a Doodle organizer, if you’ve never interacted with someone's calendar before, your invitation won’t be automatically added to their calendar. However, they are still able to:

  • Respond to the invitation sent to them via email

  • Mark you, the invitation sender, as a trusted source for future invitations

Who is not affected by Google’s anti-spam policy?

The following categories of Doodle users and Doodle participants are not affected by Google’s anti-spam policy:

  1. Doodle group poll, 1:1, and booking page participants who do not use Google Calendar

  2. Doodle event organizers who do not connect a calendar to the Doodle account

  3. Google Calendar users who have previously exchanged meeting invitations with an organizer of a meeting

  4. Google Calendar users for whom a sender is known within their Google Calendar

IMPORTANT: Once a meeting is booked, all meeting details are always sent to the participant via email whether a Doodle event organizer has connected their calendar to their Doodle account or not. Google’s recent anti-spam policy does not extend to filtering these emails - ensuring that all event participants will have access to the meeting details.

Who is affected by Google’s anti-spam policy?

All of the following criteria must be met in order to be affected by Google’s anti-spam policy:

  1. The participant of a group poll, 1:1, or booking page is a Google Calendar user,
    ​
    ​AND
    ​

  2. The participant has not previously exchanged meeting invitations with the meeting organizer and/or the sender is an unknown source within their Google Calendar,
    ​
    ​AND
    ​

  3. The organizer of the Doodle event has connected their calendar to their Doodle account.

If all three of these criteria are not met, neither the Doodle event organizer nor any participant will experience any difference in performance or experience when using Doodle.

Best practices for Doodle organizers

If some or all of your Doodle group poll, 1:1, or booking page participants could potentially be affected by Google’s anti-spam policy, please consider following some of these strategies to minimize any potential impact:

  1. Reach out to your audience before you submit your event link and request that they whitelist the meeting invitation sender via the email containing the calendar invite once the final meeting date is booked.

  2. Include a note in the event description field of your Doodle event, requesting that the participants whitelist the meeting invitation sender via the email containing the calendar invite once the final meeting date is booked.

  3. In the email you send to your participants that features your event link, request that they whitelist the meeting invitation sender via the email containing the calendar invite once the final meeting date is booked. Additionally, consider adding this link to your email in case the user is unfamiliar with how to successfully whitelist an email.

Please feel free to copy/paste the following instructions into your invitation email to help your Google Calendar users:

If we have never interacted before and you use Google Calendar, please whitelist me, the meeting invitation sender, via the email containing the calendar invite, which ensures the scheduled event is added to your calendar. Click this link to learn how to automatically add events sent from this email to your Google Calendar.

How can Doodle participants who use Google Calendar whitelist Doodle organizers?

People who use Google Calendar and participate in Doodle invitations have a few ways in which they can ensure calendar events are added to their calendar. Click here to learn more!

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