Blocking repeat spam campaigns

Some spam doesn't come from one sender you can block. It's the same message hitting your inbox over and over, from a different address every time, with just enough tweaks to slip past normal spam filters. Floods of near-identical "dating" messages, or too-good-to-be-true "special offers".

That's a spam campaign.

The Spam Blocker can recognise these campaigns by their content and block them, even when each email arrives from a brand-new sender.

How it works

When anyone using Leave Me Alone reports one of these emails as spam, we check it and see if it's part of a campaign that's running over time.

Once a campaign is confirmed, matching emails are blocked for everyone who has the feature turned on. It doesn't matter if the sender is brand new, and it doesn't matter if the wording has been shuffled around. If the content somewhat matches a known campaign, it's blocked.

Every report makes the protection better for everyone. The more of you that report these campaigns, the faster they get blocked for everybody.

How to turn it on

1. Open the Spam Blocker page
2. Enable "Also block known spam campaigns"

Where blocked campaign emails go

The same place as everything else the Spam Blocker catches. Nothing is ever deleted, and everything we block is moved to a folder you can open and check any time. See How does the Spam Blocker work? for the details.

If we block something we shouldn't

It's easy to fix, and it works the same way as any other blocked email. Click the label next to the email on the Spam Blocker page and set it as not spam, or just move the email back to your inbox in your email client. We take the hint either way, and we learn from it.