Customising the Spam Blocker

All of these settings live under Options on the Spam Blocker page. The strictness slider and the two toggles are greyed out while the Spam Blocker is switched off, so if you can't click them, turn it on with the toggle at the top of the page first.

Changing where we move spam

By default we move blocked emails to a folder called _lma-shield/spam. That's a folder named spam tucked inside a folder named _lma-shield, which keeps it out of the way of your normal folders. Nothing is deleted, so you can always go and look.

To change it:

1. Go to the Spam Blocker page.
2. Scroll down to Options.
3. Under Where should we move blocked emails?, type the folder name you want.
4. Click Save.

Note: some names are reserved by your email provider, like Spam, Junk, Archive, or Trash. If you try one of those we'll ask you to pick something else, because reusing them confuses your mail client.

Setting the strictness of the spam check

You can decide how suspicious we should be of new emails. There are five levels, and the default is Strict.

Level	What it does
Ruthless	Blocks anything that looks like spam. Worth checking your blocked folder occasionally.
Strict	Blocks most spam, but is careful with real emails. Our default.
Balanced	Blocks obvious spam, and lets borderline emails through.
Relaxed	Only blocks very likely spam. Some junk will slip through.
Lenient	Only blocks emails we're certain are spam. You'll see more junk, but real emails are very unlikely to get caught.

To change it, go to Options and pick a level on the slider under How strict should we be about spam?. It saves straight away.

There's a genuine trade-off here, and it's worth being honest about it. The stricter you go, the more junk we catch, and the more likely it is that a real email gets caught with it. The more relaxed you go, the safer your real email is, and the more junk you'll see.

A couple of notes:

• Changing this affects mail arriving from now on.
• It doesn't change cold-email blocking. That's a separate switch with its own detection, covered below.

If real emails are getting blocked, move down a level or two and rescue the email to put it back in your inbox. Rescuing also teaches our filter, so it gets better at recognising that sender.

Blocking cold emails

Cold emails are unsolicited messages from people or businesses you've never interacted with, usually trying to sell you something. They're not really spam, and they often pass every spam check going, but you didn't ask for them either.

This one's off by default. To turn it on:

1. Go to Options on the Spam Blocker page.
2. Switch on Also block cold-emails.

This feature is still experimental while we keep improving our cold-email classifier. Telling a cold sales pitch apart from a genuine first-time email is a hard problem, and we'd rather say so than pretend otherwise. Check your blocked folder more often than usual for the first week or two, so you can rescue anything we get wrong.

The strictness setting above has no effect on this. Cold emails are judged separately, so leave this switched off if you'd rather not take the chance.

Blocking previously unsubscribed emails

When you unsubscribe from a mailing list with the Unsubscriber, that list is supposed to stop emailing you. Plenty of them don't. Some ignore the request, and some quietly start again months later.

This setting catches them. If a list you've unsubscribed from tries to email you again, we move it straight to your blocked folder. It's on by default, and you'll find it under Options as Also block unsubscribed mailing-lists.

You can see every sender this applies to on the Unsubscribed Emails tab at the top of the Spam Blocker page. If you actually want to hear from one of them again, click Undo unsubscribe next to that sender and their emails will come through as normal.