Marking a ticket as spam and suspending the requester

You can mark a ticket as spam and suspend the requester at the same time. When you mark a ticket as spam, the following happens:

• The ticket is deleted and moved to the Deleted tickets view for 30 days until it is permanently deleted.
• The ticket requester is suspended and cannot submit or access tickets, or access your Help Center.

A ticket must be active (not Closed) to mark it as spam.

To recover a deleted ticket, you can restore it from the Deleted tickets view (see Restoring a deleted ticket) , and unsuspend the user (see Suspending a user). Any further tickets that the suspended user submits are added to the Suspended tickets view where you can review them (see Understanding and managing suspended tickets and spam).

You can also mark multiple tickets as spam at the same time (see Bulk marking tickets as spam and suspending the requesters). However, you cannot mark tickets created from a sharing agreement as spam (see Sharing tickets with other Zendesk Support accounts).

Note: Agents must have the correct permissions to mark spam and suspend users. On Essential, Team, or Professional, agents must have access to all tickets set in their profile, as well as permission to delete tickets in Admin > Settings > Agents. On Enterprise, agents must be able to delete users and delete tickets in their custom role.

Tip: Community tip from Colin: You can only assign the Spam permission to agents if you are willing to give them rights to delete tickets. Currently I give them a SPAM macro which simply puts the tickets in a queue for me to delete.

To mark a ticket as spam and suspend the requester:

1. Open the ticket you want to mark as spam.
2. Click the Ticket options menu in the upper right, then select Mark as spam.

   You will only see this option on tickets where the requester is an end-user.

   

3. Click Immediately mark as spam to confirm that you want to continue.

   The ticket will be deleted and cannot be recovered. The requester will be suspended. Alternatively you can click Cancel.

Important: If you use an external online form to submit emails to your Zendesk account (an unsupported workflow) and you see an influx of spam tickets arriving from that form, then marking these tickets as spam could cause the IP address associated with your form to be blocked. To help prevent attacks using your online form, add CAPTCHA to the form. However, we recommend using a supported API, Help Center form, or web widget solution to submit emails.

Reporting on tickets marked as spam

You can't run report on spam tickets. Additionally, some companies may not want to use the Mark as spam feature, for example, regulated companies.

As a workaround, you can have your agents add a tag that indicates the ticket is spam before clicking Mark as spam. You can then use that information to generate reports on tags. For more information, see Reporting with tags (Explore) and Reporting on ticket tags (Insights).

To report on tickets marked as spam

1. Create a custom ticket field called Spam (or whatever you choose to call the custom field) to check tickets that are considered to be spam.
2. Create a macro that automatically checks the field Spam and then routes the tickets to a certain group or agent.
3. Train your agents to use this macro when they spot spam tickets.
4. Once a week or a month, have an agent or a group of agents checking the queue to ensure no tickets are categorized incorrectly.

You can then use the custom ticket field to run reports on these tickets.