Managing Spam Contacts in Zoho Desk

Work inboxes are often spammed with newsletters, promotional emails, and other unsolicited content, putting important messages at risk of being overshadowed. Implementing effective spam management strategies can minimize the negative impact of unwanted messages and ensure that important emails are prioritized and easily accessible.

Spam contacts

A spam contact is an unsolicited user or bot who sends junk emails to your support email address. It's common to receive content, such as subscription or promotional offers, from a spam contact.

In certain cases, spam contacts use social engineering attack techniques to perform malicious activities through email interactions. Their emails are usually intended to persuade you to disclose information that makes it possible to steal your identity.

For instance, spammers may send a fake support email from a known company, or raise a fake customer support ticket to trick the recipient. To mitigate social engineering risks, Zoho Desk lets you mark a contact as spam manually, or enable the automatic spam detection functionality.

Marking or unmarking a contact as spam

In Zoho Desk, any agent or support administrator can manually mark or unmark spam contacts instantly. Once marked, all the current and future tickets from those contacts will be labeled as spam and moved to the Spam Contacts view, where they can unmark them if required. This will help avoid automated spam tickets raised through email or from the self-service portal.

Some important points to keep in mind while marking a contact as spam:

The contact will be denied access to your help center.
All existing and future tickets from the contact will be marked as spam.
Any duplicate contacts having the same email address will be marked as spam.
The contact's tickets shared with other departments will be revoked.

To mark a contact as spam

Log into your Zoho Desk account.
Navigate to the Customers module.
Open the desired contact to mark it as spam.
Click the More Actions icon () in the upper-right corner of the page.
Click Mark Spam from the drop-down.
Click Mark As Spam to confirm the selection.

To unmark a contact as spam

Go to the Customers module.
On the left pane, under All Views, select Spam Contacts.
Open the contact you want to unmark as spam.
Click Not Spam at the bottom of the Contact Details page.
This will open a confirmation window.
Check Unmark existing tickets from this contact also as spam, if needed.
Click OK to confirm.
The contact will be unmarked as spam.

Automatic Spam Detection

By default, Zoho Desk scans all incoming tickets and automatically marks suspicious tickets as spam. These tickets are then moved to the Spam Tickets view, ensuring they do not clutter the regular Tickets module. This streamlined process helps keep inboxes organized and compliant by preventing spam messages from entering the Tickets module in the first place.

By default, administrators can enable or disable the automatic spam detection functionality. Agents with Manage General Permissions settings can perform this operation as well.

There are different options available for Automatic Spam Detection in Zoho Desk:

Mark only the suspicious Tickets as spam; not the associated Contacts: With this option, Zoho Desk will automatically detect and classify suspicious support tickets as spam. However, the contacts linked to these tickets will not be marked as spam.
Auto-mark both the suspicious tickets and the associated contacts as spam: With this option, Zoho Desk will not only identify and categorize suspicious support tickets as spam, but also automatically label the associated contacts as spam. Note that any future support tickets received from these contacts will be automatically marked as spam and moved to the Spam Tickets view.
Mark the suspicious tickets as spam. Do not auto-mark the associated contacts as spam if they have other valid tickets: This option involves marking the suspicious support tickets as spam, but it won't mark other valid tickets associated with the same contact as spam. This means that if a contact has other non-suspicious tickets, Zoho Desk will not auto-mark them as spam.

To enable or disable automatic spam detection

Go to Setup ( ) > Customization > General Settings.
Select Contacts from the left panel.
Toggle ON the option.
Select one of the available options for Automatic Spam Detection.