Better control over spam and deletion

Great suggestion!

I have created a set of workflows with instructions on how to implement them to manage incoming spam until this feature is added to Intercom:

Would really love to see this in Intercom!

I’d love to see this, too. There’s a cottage industry of service companies that cold email all new domain registrations and continuously monitor services like Google Ads to identify prospects. Anyone who uses a new domain with Intercom will likely receive more spam emails advertising business services than they will receive real customer support requests.

The tickets are easy to get rid of (by closing them) but it’s unclear what the impact of doing that is: should I be marking these tickets as resolved (though they didn’t require action)? Should I be leaving them in submitted (will they come back to haunt me)? There’s no information about the consequence of doing this, whether it will render reporting inaccurate and/or leave tickets lingering.

Deleting tickets is bad (due to the potential for human error) so I am not comfortable using ticket deleting automation. A first-class option to “Mark as Spam” which would take the ticket into some sort of out-of-the-way (but auditable) purgatory (that is excluded from reporting etc.) would be a great improvement.

I don’t mind dealing with spam, I’d rather have to review a bunch of spam tickets by hand than have an inaccurate automation unintentionally flag a real ticket as spam, but I do need a way to handle them appropriately. For now, I’ve got a macro that moves the spam into its own “spam” inbox (after experimenting with ticket types and states) but it required a bunch of experimentation (and I’m still unclear whether or not this is the best solution or has caveats I will soon discover).

I agree with the challenges mentioned so far.

The proposed feature request and many more should be added for Fin for emails, especially considering the 0.99 USD per resolution cost. Fin/Intercom is not able to properly filter out spam by itself in many cases, and the controls we have are minimal. Additionally, if marked manually as spam by agents or the Intercom admin, they shouldn’t count as Fin resolutions and be completely separate in statistics and billing. 

Some great, very relevant ideas suggested here - fully onboard as the amount of spam we are receiving is becoming difficult to manage. Being able to “clear” the spam inbox by permanently deleting them will help us to control it better - but I’d love to be able to whitelist those who are not spam, that keep ending up there. 
Would love to see this worked on in the near future 

 

This is not just useful, but crucial - important thing can land in spam and there’s no way to teach Intercom about it 

Adding on to this idea,  some custom email header filtering settings would be ideal as well.

• Enforcing Unique Company Policies: Custom filters can help enforce data loss prevention (DLP) policies by identifying and blocking sensitive information from being sent in outbound emails. Many companies have scenarios unique to them that are hard to capture in a one size fits all set up
• Regulatory Compliance: Filtering can help organizations comply with data protection regulations by preventing unauthorized data leaks through email. 
• Enhanced Security: Advanced Header filtering can identify and block emails based on suspicious headers or patterns that indicate phishing attempts or malware.
• Reduced Manual Sorting and Email Loops: By automating email processing based on header information, support teams can save time and effort on manual sorting and categorization especially with email loops between two competing autoresponders.

Extra or custom email header filtering options allows for a more tailored, controlled, efficient, and secure email environment that can accommodate the unique needs of each company, ultimately leading to a better customer experience.

This is a big miss! How should I exclude those messages I should delete from the get go? Instead, we can only close them manually but this of course, affects reporting.

​@Paul Byrne ​@Diana Tripac or anyone else from the Intercom Team. Would be great to get some kind of feedback/insights on what’s being planned for this and any other related initiative. 
Another new one was opened recently here:
 

They’re all connected to automated spam management, fine-tuning, and controls. 

Great suggestions here. 

We’ve had to add several email address and domains to the Trusted senders (in Email Settings) which is a not very well known setting in intercom. This is one way around stopping certain emails being marked as spam.

We also implemented a way to “manage and clear the spam inbox” as it was getting impossible to know what had been reviewed.
This is a more time consuming approach but does mean you can be 100% sure you don’t miss an important email

1. Get team leads to review the spam inbox daily
2. Remove everything from it so it goes to the normal inbox
3. From there use a macro to quickly tag, and close actual spam emails using a macro with appropriate actions.
4. Any non spam can be reassigned to the correct inboxes (again we do this using macros)

Doing this daily means we keep it clear and takes minimal time compared with trying to review a spam inbox that has no function to manage its contents. 

We can then use report to see spam inbound count and stop them before they even reach intercom by blocking certain email address or domains at a email account level (eg in gmail inbox, suite settings)