The notification settings don’t help real Classroom users
Spam has a way of getting around to all the platforms we use online. Whether it’s good ol’ fashioned phone calls or email, the comments section of anything, or automated content generation polluting the tubes of YouTube, it’s all unpleasant and messy and the only real saving grace we have is the ability to ignore it. But for Google Classroom users who are dealing with a wave of fresh textual horrors, they might not even have a valid way of doing so.
In the annuls of the Google Classroom Help forums, you’ll see a few spare threads such as this one dating back to April 2021 where complainants detail an invitation to a classroom from a dubious source on a dubious topic such as an entitlement scam. The user then asks if there’s a way to block these invitations. In later threads — like this one from last week — you’ll usually find Mark Loundy, a Diamond Product Expert, replying in one way or another to say that unless users set up a filter on their email client, there’s no way to block this spam.
Unfortunately, spammers have discovered Google Classroom and have been using it for distribution. The emails are not coming from Google, but from the spammers using the Google platform. Your only option is to block them.
Loundy also makes the point that the Classroom Help forums are moderated by community managers and product experts — implying there’s not much of an escalation path from that point.
Android Police founder Artem Russakovskii has even tweeted (NSFW) about receiving a spam invite and notes that the notification settings for Google Classroom aren’t at all fine-grained with a single toggle for all email notifications.
Those who use Google Classroom for scholarly education or training and have to deal with these seedy invitations are left between a rock and a hard place.
We’ve reached out to Google to see if it has comment as well as any interest in solving the problem.
