Having a public or easily guessable support email address means you may begin getting significant amounts of spam to your ticketing inbox. This is good old fashioned email spam, not the type which could come in through your ticket request form(s). Helpy includes features to help you block, manage and control the spam you receive via email.

Managing spam can be broken down into three main categories-

• Blocking spam outright
• Filtering spam into a spam folder
• Manually dealing with spam that has made it past the filters

In addition, Helpy 2.7 has introduced a new filter affecting specific email addresses or entire domains.  Tickets received from email addresses on this list will automatically be categorized as spam.

Hosted Helpy uses SpamAssassin to identify and rate the likelihood that a given ticket is actually spam.  The lower the score, the less likely that an email is spam. The default configuration of Helpy blocks all email scoring 4 or higher.

Email service providers like Sendgrid, Mandrill, Postmark or Mailgun, should also provide SpamAssassin ratings, which on-premise and open source Helpy installs can make use of.

Blocking Spam Outright

On the email settings panel, you will find two settings- one called the SpamAssassin reject threshold. This means that any email with a SA score higher than the threshold will be blocked completely. This means you will never see the message and it will not count against your ticket allotment for the month (if your account is ticket limited).

The default setting for blocking emails outright is 4.0.   If you think you are not receiving all tickets, you could bump this higher, or if you are still getting spam through, move this lower.

Filtering Spam

The second threshold you can tune is the score which will filter messages into your Spam folder in Helpy. By default this is set to 2.0 which means that any email that has a SA higher than 2 (but lower than the block threshold) will end up in your spam folder. If you are getting a lot of non spam messages sent to your spam folder, try increasing this threshold. If you are getting a lot spam messages into your regular ticket queues, you might want to make this threshold lower.

In addition, you can provide specific email addresses or domain hostnames that will be filtered as spam automatically.  Adding email addresses to this list will cause any ticket sent from a matching email address to automatically be sent to spam, regardless of its spam score.  Separate multiple addresses with commas.  You can provide a complete email address like tom@jones.me or just a hostname like spammer.com.  The later would match any email address with a @spammer.com email address.

Dealing with Spam Tickets

The best filters in the world occasionally let spam through, and this can really clog up your ticketing UI. To clean up, use the search function to find all of the spam messages. If there are hundreds or thousands, check the “super select” checkbox to select all matching tickets (not just those visible on the page.) Move these tickets to the trash, then go to the trash folder and “Empty the trash”.