How do you handle spam?

[MrGeneration]

Personally I think that this is more a E-Mail-Server-Problem than a Zammad one at this end.
You proberbly have Spamfilters in your setup in front of Zammad, so you should train those to recognize the Spam correctly.

What I’ve learned so far is that most of the times blocking a single Mail-Address is simply not enough, it changes too often. But: The content doesn’t, so that’s a better way to address it.

But again, just my opinion.

[SEGGER-NV]

Hi,

Understandable point of view. However in our business/usecase we often get requests which under no circumstances may be delayed. So we can’t risk having “normal” spam filters running that might block or delay incoming e-mails. Especially as we are working with a very international client base so often valid mails from e.g. Asian countries get flagged by state of the art content filters, no matter which provider. We tested a fair share of automatic filters and none of them were actually useful to such usecase and often ended up blocking actual customers.

@MrGeneration

What I’ve learned so far is that most of the times blocking a single Mail-Address is simply not enough, it changes too often. But: The content doesn’t, so that’s a better way to address it.

This holds true for “smart” spammers. However they are rarely an issue for us. It is more the blatant Spam with always the same subjects and sometimes even always the same sender e-mail address.
Yes we can hold such lists on a block list on the mail server side, however often the sender e-mails are highjacked accounts that spam its address book. Such e-mail addresses are usually still customers so we can’t block them permanently. This happens quite often with customers from developing countries with a lack of security awareness.

So generally we are glad that Zammad does offer some Kind of Spam management to counter such Spam. If on purpose or not is another topic all we are asking for is to have it more convenient so either an Agent can populate such Spamlists by Flagging users or over trigger or scheduler jobs so we can separate which might be a highjacked customer and which is definitely a spammer.

[herzkerl]

Thank you all for your tips and explanations. We’re currently using two ‘filters’ within Zammad:

All we have to do is put spam-users in the #spam organisation every now and then.

Looking forward to your (maybe even better) ideas!

[tornardo]

Can you eleborate how one can create the X-Spam-Flag criteria?

[martin.von.wittich]

-> Channels -> Email -> Filter -> New

• name: close & tag Spam X-Spam-Flag (or however you’d like to call it)
• match all:
  • X-Spam-Flag -> contains -> YES
• perform actions:
  • Tag -> add -> spam
  • State -> closed