Spam management in Commslayer

Managing spam effectively keeps your inbox clean and your team focused on real customers. Commslayer handles spam at multiple levels — automatic detection, manual marking, and automation rules for known senders.

This article is about spam that arrives in your inbox. If your own replies are landing in customers' spam folders, see Customers aren't receiving your replies.

How spam detection works#

Standard email inboxes use built-in spam scoring. Emails with a high spam score are moved to the Spam folder before they reach your inbox. This is always on.

Gmail inboxes rely on Gmail's own spam filtering. Emails that Gmail flags as spam are synced into your Spam folder in Commslayer automatically. No setup needed.

The Spam folder#

Spam is an item in the left sidebar, near All conversations. It lists every conversation from a blocked sender, whether caught automatically or marked by your team. Inside Spam, the status dropdown filters the list by Open, Pending or Resolved. Pick All to see every conversation in Spam.

Conversations in Spam are left out of your other lists and your reports. Saved views leave them out too, unless the view has the condition Status equal to Spam. For a blocked sender Commslayer also skips the AI agent, auto-labels, automation rules on Conversation created and Message created, and notifications. A conversation nobody replies to is not billable.

The number next to Spam counts the open conversations in it. To clear it, open Spam, select the conversations and click Resolve on the toolbar.

Mark a conversation as spam#

Right-click any conversation and select Mark as spam. This does three things:

• Moves the conversation to the Spam folder

• Blocks the contact

• Auto-routes future messages from that contact to Spam

Blocking is contact-level — when you block a contact, all their conversations move to Spam.

Bulk mark as spam#

To clear multiple conversations at once:

1. Hover over a conversation in the list and tick the checkbox that replaces the icon on the left of the row. Tick more, or press Cmd + A (Mac) or Ctrl + A (Windows) to select every conversation loaded in the list.

2. On the toolbar at the bottom of the screen, click the three dots at the right end and choose Mark as spam.

3. Confirm. This blocks the senders, and all their other conversations move to Spam too.

Select all covers the conversations loaded so far. Scroll down to load more before selecting.

All selected conversations move to the Spam folder in one step.

Recover a false positive#

Found a real customer in Spam? Right-click the conversation and select Not spam. This unblocks the sender and moves all their conversations out of Spam. Each conversation keeps the status it had, so a resolved one is under Resolved, not Open. Future messages arrive normally. On a Gmail quick setup inbox, Gmail's spam verdict won't block that sender again.

To recover several at once, select them in Spam, click the three dots on the toolbar and choose Not spam.

You can also unblock from the conversation itself: open it, and click Unblock under the customer account panel on the right side.

Blocklist#

The blocklist shows every blocked contact. To open it, open any conversation in Spam and click View blocklist in the banner in the customer panel on the right. The banner reads "This contact is blocked. Their messages go to spam." Administrators and managers can open the blocklist. You can see who blocked each contact (or "System" if it was auto-detected), when they were blocked, and unblock them directly from here.

Notifications, invoices and other mail that isn't spam#

Order notifications from Shopify, invoices, app alerts and newsletters aren't spam, but they don't need a reply either. There is no setting that stops an email from becoming a conversation. Commslayer can resolve, label or hide the conversation as it arrives, and keep the AI agent away from it.

By sender, subject or inbox: an automation rule#

1. Go to Settings → Automations → Add automation rule and pick the event Conversation created.

2. Add a condition:

   • Sender email with Equal to for one address, or Contains for a whole domain (for example "@example.com") or a pattern such as "noreply".

   • Email subject with Contains, for example "invoice".

   • Inbox with Equal to, to catch everything that arrives in one inbox.

3. Add the action Resolve conversation. There is no "close" action. Resolved is the closed state. To keep the email open for a person instead, use Assign to agent or Add a label.

   

A conversation resolved this way doesn't stay in your Open list. It gets no AI agent reply and no CSAT survey, and it isn't billable unless someone replies to it.

By content: an auto-label#

For mail you can only recognise by what it says, use an auto-label with Show in Inbox unticked and Unassign AI agent ticked. The steps are in the next section.

What the AI agent skips by itself#

The AI agent doesn't reply to senders in Spam, to out-of-office messages and other automatic replies that identify themselves as automatic, or to mail sent from the inbox's own address. It can reply to newsletters, receipts and no-reply notifications that arrive in an inbox it covers, unless a rule or an auto-label catches them first. You don't need guidance for this. A rule that resolves the conversation and an auto-label with Unassign AI agent ticked both act before the AI agent replies.

When to use Mark as spam instead#

Use Mark as spam only for senders you never want to hear from. It blocks the address. Auto-labels and rules on Conversation created and Message created stop running for it.

Content-based spam filtering (Plus and Scale plans)#

If spam can't be identified by sender address, use the Spam Auto-label tool to filter by content.

1. Go to Settings → Labels.

   

2. Enable Auto-labels

   

3. Click on Add label

   

4. Click on Apply automatically

   

5. In the Description field, describe the type of emails to label as spam (e.g., "emails offering fake giveaways" or "messages containing cryptocurrency scams").

   

6. From the Trigger actions select Resolve conversation and Disable CSAT Survey

   Disable CSAT survey only applies when this auto-label resolves the conversation. It doesn't stop the survey when the label is added by hand or when a person resolves the conversation later.

   

7. Save your settings.

New conversations that match are labelled from now on. Existing conversations are not re-checked. Use both methods together: rules for senders you know, an auto-label for content.

Troubleshooting#

Not receiving emails marked as spam by Gmail?#

1. Create a new filter in Gmail

2. Enter is:spam in the Has the words field

3. A warning will appear, but you can safely ignore it and press OK

4. Check the Never send it to Spam checkbox

5. Click Create filter

It should look like something like this:

Legitimate emails flagged as spam

• Review your automation rules and check if a real sender's address or domain was accidentally included. Remove or update the rule if needed.

• In the Auto-label tool, make your prompt more specific. For example, instead of "emails about promotions," use "emails about cryptocurrency promotions from unknown senders."

Spam folder taking up space
Conversations in the Spam folder don't count toward reports or AI responses, and they don't expire automatically. There is no delete action for a conversation, so they stay in the Spam folder, out of your inbox. The one way to remove them for good is to delete the contact, which permanently deletes that contact and all their conversations. Administrators and managers can do that from the contact's page.