Keep junk out of your inbox

Spam is caught as it arrives and nothing about it needs setting up: your agent never replies to it, and it lands closed in the Spam view where you can still go and look.

The part that matters is not how much it catches. It is what you do on the day it catches a real customer, which is the last section here.

How junk gets caught

Three layers, and they catch different things.

• Your agent flags obvious junk across every channel, and each catch carries a short reason so you are not guessing why something was pulled.
• It takes your email provider's verdict into account. If Gmail already decided a message was spam, that counts here too. This layer is email only, because no other channel has a provider opinion to borrow.
• Your blocklist. In Settings > Spam you can block a sender's email, a whole domain, or a keyword, and those rules apply across every channel rather than just mail.

The detection is deliberately cautious, letting borderline things through rather than catching everything. That trade is the right way round: a missed spam message costs you a second of scrolling, and a caught customer costs you a customer.

What happens to a spam conversation

Your agent does not reply. The conversation is closed and moved to the Spam view, and it is left out of your counts and your notifications so it does not distort your reporting.

Nothing in Spam is ever deleted automatically. It stays there and stays readable, and you can delete it by hand if you want to.

Marking it yourself

From inside a conversation, Mark as spam closes it, moves it, and takes you to the next one, so working through a wave of junk does not mean clicking back and forth.

It is reversible, and it teaches the detector, which is exactly why it is worth using rather than just deleting things: every time you mark or unmark something, the catching gets a little better at your business.

From the Spam view, Not spam puts a conversation back in your inbox.

When a real customer lands in Spam

This is the case that matters, so here is the order to do it in.

Restore it first. Not spam from the Spam view, and reply as normal. Getting back to the customer beats diagnosing why it happened.

Then check your blocklist. A whole domain or a keyword rule is the usual culprit, and a keyword rule in particular catches far more than people expect when they write it. If the rule was too broad, narrow it now rather than after it happens again.

Then mark it Not spam, which teaches the detector. If the same sender keeps landing in Spam, it is worth also checking how your email provider treats them, since a message your provider is convinced is junk starts from a worse position here.

Checking the Spam view once a week takes a minute and is the only way to notice this pattern before a customer tells you about it.