How does the Spam Blocker work?

The Spam Blocker watches the mail arriving in your inbox and quietly moves the unwanted stuff somewhere else. Spam, cold sales pitches, and mailing lists you've already unsubscribed from never get the chance to interrupt you.

Nothing is ever deleted. Everything we block is moved to a folder you can open and check any time.

You can turn it on and off with the toggle at the top of the Spam Blocker page.

How we decide what to block

Every email that arrives goes through a series of checks, in this order. The first one that matches decides what happens, so the checks near the top take priority.

1. Your Custom Blocklist. If you've blocked that address, domain, or filter yourself, it's blocked. Your own rules come before our spam check, so we won't second-guess you.
2. Senders you've unsubscribed from. If you used the Unsubscriber on that list and it's emailing you anyway, we block it. You can switch this off.
3. Senders you've already allowed. If you've previously let this sender through in the Screener, or chosen to keep their emails, we leave them alone and skip the spam check entirely.
4. Our spam and cold-email check. Anything still standing gets run against our spam classifier

How we spot spam

We classify an email as spam if:

• The sender's email address, domain, or IP address appears on a public spam blocklist
• The content is a close match for our spam classifier
• The content looks like emails you've marked as spam before in Leave Me Alone

The Spam Blocker learns from you specifically, so the more you use it, the better it gets at recognising the junk you personally get.

You can decide how suspicious we should be, from Ruthless to Lenient. See Customising the Spam Blocker for what each level means.

How we spot cold emails

Cold emails are unsolicited messages from people you've never dealt with, usually trying to sell you something. They're the trickiest thing we block, because technically they're legitimate mail and they often sail straight through a normal spam check.

So we look for the signs of bulk sales outreach instead:

• Links to known cold-outreach and sales tools, or to domains we've seen used for them
• Tracking pixels and read receipts, so the sender knows the moment you open it
• A sender address on our list of known cold-email senders
• An opening that introduces the sender to you, because you've never met
• A subject line faking a reply, like RE: on a conversation that never happened
• A reply-to address on a different domain to the one that sent it
• Headers that give away mass-mailing software

Signals can point the other way too. A proper display name, a valid signature, and headers marking a message as personal all count in the sender's favour.

An email is never both spam and cold. If it looks like both, we treat it as spam.

The strictness levels don't apply here. Cold emails are judged on their own, so if you switch this on and find it too keen, turn it back off rather than reaching for a more relaxed strictness setting. The switch is in Customising the Spam Blocker.

Where blocked emails go

Blocked emails are moved out of your inbox into a folder called _lma-shield/spam, which is a folder named spam inside a folder named _lma-shield. If it doesn't exist yet, we create it. You can pick a different folder in Customising the Spam Blocker.

Blocked emails don't show up in your Screener. The Spam Blocker and the Screener are separate, so your Screener stays about senders you actually need to make a decision on.

Seeing what got blocked

The Spam Blocker page lists everything blocked recently, and each one carries a label telling you why:

• spam, because it matched our spam check
• cold, because it looked like a cold sales email
• old-unsubscribe, because you'd already unsubscribed from that sender
• blocklisted, because it matched your Custom Blocklist

There's a link to see everything from the past 48 hours from the history page.

If we block something we shouldn't

It happens sometimes, but it's easy to fix. Click the label next to the email and pick the action from the menu. For spam click "Set as not spam", for a cold email it's "Set as not-cold", and for the other two it's "Move back to inbox".

You can also just move the email back to your inbox in your email client. We check for that too.

Either way we take the hint. We'll leave that email where it is, and we learn from it, so emails like it are less likely to be blocked in future. If real emails are getting caught more than occasionally, try a more relaxed strictness level in Customising the Spam Blocker.