Plan requirement
| Subscription | Any plan |
| Access | Admin |
Spam reaching a support address is inevitable. The layers that reduce it, and the one that matters most for a public inbox.
The layers you have
- Suspension. Detected spam is held before it becomes a ticket. This does most of the work.
- The blocklist. Named addresses and domains, refused outright.
- The allowlist. Senders that must never be suspended, which reduces the false positives that make people stop trusting the filter.
- Authentication records. Publishing SPF, DKIM and DMARC for your own domain makes mail forged in your name easier to reject.
- CAPTCHA on your request form, which stops automated submissions through the help centre.
Marking as spam is not the tidy version of deleting
In the suspended tickets list the choices are to recover the ticket, recover it after editing its properties, or delete it permanently. Mark as spam is not one of them, and anything you leave alone is deleted automatically after 14 days.
Mark as spam is an action on a live ticket, and it does two things rather than one. The ticket is deleted and sits in the Deleted tickets view for 30 days, and the requester is suspended: they cannot submit tickets or reach your help centre at all. Both halves can be undone, by restoring the ticket and unsuspending the person, but only if somebody notices.
So it is the right action for an address that is genuinely abusing you, and the wrong reflex for a message that merely looked like rubbish.
The trade-off nobody escapes
Tighter filtering suspends more genuine customers. Looser filtering puts more rubbish in front of agents. There is no setting that avoids both, so the practical answer is a moderate filter plus somebody reviewing the suspended list.
Where spam is a symptom
A sudden increase usually means your address has been harvested, often from a public web page. Publishing a form rather than an address, and keeping the mailbox out of page source, reduces the supply at the origin.
Comments
0 comments
Article is closed for comments.