Purging unwanted calendar items by leveraging the invite.ics file info and the GAM utility.

If you’re a sysadmin / IT professional, and you’ve been asked to delete a stale/dead/inaccessible Google Calendar event, this is a process by which you can get that event deleted. These instructions assume you are using a Windows workstation, and are in a Google Workspace environment.

  1. Download and install the GAM utility. This requires use of setting up a Google Cloud account, and designating a project that authorizes its use.
  2. Make sure you have an email client such as eM Client or Thunderbird; any client that lets you download ICS attachments from calendar invite emails.
  3. Set up your email client to access your company Google account.
  4. Have a coworker still on the unwanted calendar event send you a copy of the invite for it. You should receive an ICS file with the invite.
  5. Open up the ICS file using Notepad or some other text editor. Under ORGANIZER, there will be a mailto: address; you’ll need the email address that ends in group.calendar.google.com. You will also need the UID, excluding the @google.com identifier.
  6. Open up the folder where you installed GAM, and right-click and use Terminal to bring up a command-line prompt.
  7. Verify that it is successful in locating the event: 
    .\gam.exe calendar (ORGANIZER email address) delete event (UID)
  8. The event should delete: 
    .\gam.exe calendar (ORGANIZER email address) delete event (UID) doit

If you’re unable to follow steps 4 & 5, you can skip ahead to step 6, and then run:

.\gam.exe calendar (ORGANIZER email address) show events > events.txt

That will produce an events.txt file you can open and review. Locate the desired event, and follow steps 7 & 8.