When you’re trying to deliver exceptional customer support, the last thing you need is spam clogging up your Zendesk instance.
Whether it’s unsolicited promotional emails, bots abusing your contact forms, or low-effort junk from your help center, spam is more than just an annoyance. It can disrupt workflows, muddy performance metrics, and waste valuable time.
Spam management might seem straightforward, but if you’re not actively staying ahead of it, it can become a recurring and frustrating problem for your team.
Thankfully, Zendesk gives you a suite of tools to help reduce spam’s impact and keep your support channels clean.
In this guide, you’ll learn how to handle Zendesk spam: how to manage it when it lands in your system, how to prevent it from reaching your team in the first place, and how to stay on top of moderation using your spam queue.
How to Manage Spam Tickets
Before you can prevent spam, you need to know how to properly manage it when it shows up.
Zendesk provides several built-in tools to help you take action on unwanted tickets and monitor the patterns over time.
Marking a ticket as spam
When you identify a suspicious ticket, the fastest way to clean it out is to mark it as spam.
To do that in Zendesk, simply open the ticket, click the options menu in the top right, and select Mark as spam.
Doing this deletes the ticket and suspends the sender, which means they won’t be able to send more junk into your queue.
Bulk deleting spam tickets
Spam rarely shows up one message at a time.
If your inbox gets hit with a wave, use Zendesk’s bulk actions to clean it up quickly:
- From the ticket list view, use the checkboxes to select multiple tickets.
- Click the options menu, then choose Mark as spam.
This not only deletes all selected tickets, but also suspends each associated user.
You can also take advantage of something like the Zendesk Merge Tickets App to combine multiple tickets and mark them as spam all at once.
Understanding Zendesk Suspended Tickets
Zendesk has an automatic filter that suspends certain types of messages before they ever make it into your ticket views.
These show up in the Suspended Tickets queue and can include:
- Emails from known spam domains.
- Messages with invalid “From” headers.
- Automated replies like vacation notices or emails from “noreply” addresses.
- Tickets from suspended users.
- Anything Zendesk deems suspicious.
It’s important to remember that suspended tickets are automatically deleted after 14 days, so you’ll want to review them regularly to catch any false positives!
You can either recover them (if legitimate) or delete them permanently.
Reporting on Spam Tickets
While you can’t technically run reports on tickets you mark as spam in Zendesk (because Zendesk Explore only reports on active ticket data, and spam tickets get deleted), you can use a workaround to assess your spam ticket volume.
The easiest way to do this is to stop using Zendesk’s native mark as spam option and instead have your team members add a tag to spam tickets.
You can even create a macro that adds the tag, assigns the ticket to a specific team member or group, and marks the ticket as solved.
You can then use Zendesk explore to run regular reports on tickets with your spam tag, showing you how spam volume changes over time.
Stopping Spam Attacks from Contact Forms
If you’re noticing a sudden spike in spam, check your contact forms. Bots often target these because they’re public and easily accessible. To reduce this risk:
- Enable CAPTCHA (more on this in the next section).
- Add required fields that are harder for bots to fill.
- Use IP blacklisting for repeat offenders.
How to Prevent Spam from Your Zendesk Help Center
Spam doesn’t just land in your inbox, it can find its way into your help center comments and user-generated content too.
Proactive prevention is key to reducing the burden on your team and jeopardizing the quality of your knowledge base.
Use the spam filter
The built-in Zendesk spam filter for Zendesk Guide (aka your help center) automatically flags suspicious content for review.
It uses machine learning to identify spam based on known patterns. You’ll find flagged posts in the Spam Queue, where you can review, delete, or approve them.
To make the most of the filter and effectively train it to correctly identify spam:
- Regularly check the spam queue.
- Mark legitimate content as “Not spam”.
- Delete any obvious junk.
Over time, this will help the spam filter improve and you should see less false positives getting caught up in the filter.
Zendesk Guides rate limits
Zendesk Guide automatically limits the number of new comments and posts a user can create within 24 hours. This should automatically help reduce spam, without negatively affecting real users of your help center or community.
Block IP addresses and domains
Recurring spam from the same sources? Block them. In Zendesk, you can:
- Suspend users who consistently post spam.
- Use triggers and business rules to flag tickets from certain domains.
- Block known spam IPs at the server or application level.
Zendesk doesn’t currently have a built-in IP blocker, but you can work with your web team to restrict traffic from bad actors to your contact forms or help center.
Leverage CAPTCHA
CAPTCHA is your best first line of defense against bots. Zendesk includes Cloudflare’s reCAPTCHA as an automatic option for your help center.
Before users can post comments, they must sign in, and as part of creating their account any users flagged as suspicious will need to click through the CAPTCHA experience.
If you enable the Anybody can submit tickets setting, the same thing will also be applied to your ticket forms within your Zendesk help center.
Moderate for Suspicious Words
Zendesk doesn’t currently offer a word-based spam filter, but you can create custom moderation workflows.
For instance, you can set up Zendesk triggers to flag content that includes certain words commonly used in spam.
For example, you could set up a trigger like the following:
When a ticket meets those conditions, you might have an action to add a ‘spam’ tag or to assign the ticket to a specific user or group.
While this method isn’t foolproof and may create some false positives, it’s an extra layer of protection, especially if you’re being targeted with a specific message over and over again.
Managing Your Spam Queue in Zendesk Guide
Once spam gets flagged by the filter or reported by your team, it lands in the Spam Queue.
It’s your final line of defense before this content affects your help center or support team.
Here’s how to manage that queue effectively:
Delete content
Don’t hesitate to permanently delete obvious spam. Removing it keeps your community clean and prevents SEO penalties for low-quality content.
- Go to the Spam tab in Guide.
- Select unwanted content.
- Click Delete.
Zendesk doesn’t allow restoring deleted content, so be sure it’s truly spam.
Suspend the user
If the same user is repeatedly posting spam, you can suspend their account.
Suspended users can no longer post in your help center or submit tickets. This is your best bet for stopping targeted attacks from known spammers.
You can suspend users from the People section in your Guide settings or directly from their profile in Zendesk Support.
Mark as not spam (if applicable)
False positives happen, especially if the spam filter is new or if your content has niche keywords. If a post is incorrectly flagged:
- Open the flagged content in the spam queue.
- Click Not spam.
This trains Zendesk’s filter and improves its accuracy over time.
Taking Control of Zendesk Spam
A Zendesk spam attack may never be completely avoidable, but with the right setup and precautions, you can minimize its impact and free your support team to focus on real customers.
Take a little time up front to implement the controls mentioned above, then make it a habit to review your spam queue, train your agents on how to flag suspicious content, and fine-tune your prevention settings.
By actively managing spam across tickets and your help center, you protect the integrity of your support experience—and give your team one less headache to deal with each day.
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Written by Eryn Chesney
Eryn is an experienced e-commerce CX leader with a strong background in writing and content marketing. She’s passionate about empowering support teams and using the invaluable insights they collect to drive business success.
