The Zendesk Spam Problem: When You Can't Tell What Actually Matters

Last week I talked to a support manager who said something that stuck with me: "We're at 1,200 tickets in the queue. I'd bet 400 of those are spam or stuff that shouldn't even be there. But nobody has time to go through and check."

That's the thing about Zendesk ticket volume—it's not just about being busy. It's about not knowing what's actually important anymore because everything looks the same in your inbox.

How spam gets into Zendesk in the first place

Most people think of spam as those obvious "click here for amazing deals" emails. That stuff's easy to catch. The spam problem in Zendesk is way more subtle.

Here's what actually shows up as tickets:

None of this is the obvious "CLICK HERE FOR VIAGRA" spam. It all looks plausible enough that it makes it through your filters and becomes a ticket someone has to read.

The duplicate problem

Then there's duplicates. Customer submits a form. Doesn't get an immediate response. Submits again. Still nothing (because you're processing a backlog). Submits a third time, maybe from a different email.

Now you've got three tickets for the same issue. All slightly different wording. Your automation rules don't catch it because they're looking at exact matches, and "My payment didn't go through" vs "Payment issue" vs "Why was my card charged?" all look different to a keyword matcher.

Misrouted stuff from other departments

Sales questions hitting your support form. Billing issues going to technical support. Product feedback ending up in the general queue because someone used your generic contact form instead of the feedback portal you built.

This technically isn't spam, but it's noise. And it all adds to the ticket count your team has to wade through to find what actually needs their attention.

Why Zendesk's automation can't solve this

Look, Zendesk's automation rules are fine for what they do. But they were built for a simpler time when spam meant obvious garbage and real tickets had clear patterns.

Here's what I mean. You set up a rule: "If subject contains 'spam' or 'unsubscribe', automatically close the ticket."

Great! Except now you're also closing tickets like "Getting spam emails from your system, how do I stop them?" because your rule just saw the word "spam" and acted.

The keyword problem

Automation rules work on keywords and tags. But spam doesn't use convenient keywords anymore. That "I'd love to discuss how our AI solution can help" email? No spam keywords in there. Looks like a legitimate business inquiry until you read it and realize it's a cold pitch.

Same with routing. You set up: "If message mentions 'billing' → assign to billing team."

Sounds smart. Then someone writes: "Quick question about your product—also, random side note, does billing happen monthly or annually?" and it gets sent to billing when it's really a sales question. The word "billing" appeared, so the rule fired. Context? Nope, rules don't do context.

You end up with rule explosion

I've seen Zendesk accounts with 200+ automation rules. Each one handling a specific edge case someone thought of. New product feature? Add 5 new rules. New team member? Update the assignment rules. Spam getting through? Add another filter rule.

After a year, nobody fully understands the rule system anymore. Rules contradict each other. You're scared to delete old ones because something might break. And tickets still get misrouted constantly because, again, rules don't understand what people are actually saying.

What too many tickets actually costs you

The obvious cost: your team's time. Someone has to read all this stuff. Close the spam. Reassign the misrouted tickets. Merge the duplicates.

But there's a worse cost most people don't think about: you stop trusting your Zendesk.

One company told me they calculated about 8 hours per week—collectively across the team—just managing spam and misrouted tickets. That's 20% of one full-time employee's time. Every single week. Forever.

The pattern I keep seeing

Talk to enough support teams and you hear the same story:

Month 1-3: Zendesk works great. Tickets come in, team handles them, everyone's happy.

Month 4-6: Volume picks up. You add some automation rules to handle the load. Still pretty manageable.

Month 7-12: More spam starts getting through. More edge cases. Rules get complicated. You're tweaking them constantly.

Year 2: Nobody's quite sure how the routing works anymore. Tickets get misrouted regularly. The queue never feels under control. Someone suggests "maybe we just need to hire more people?"

But hiring doesn't fix it. Because the problem isn't capacity—it's that too much junk is entering the system. More people just means more people sorting through spam.

What actually works: filtering before Zendesk

The teams I've seen successfully deal with this all did basically the same thing: they stopped trying to filter spam inside Zendesk and started filtering it before tickets get created.

Think about it differently. Right now, your flow is:

1. 1. Form submission comes in
2. 2. Automatically becomes a Zendesk ticket
3. 3. Team sorts through everything manually
4. 4. Spam gets closed, real stuff gets handled

What if step 2 was smarter? What if something read the submission first and decided whether it should even become a ticket?

How pre-filtering actually works

Instead of sending every form submission straight to Zendesk, you add a step in between that:

• Reads what someone actually wrote. Not just looking for keywords—actually understanding "is this a real support question or a sales pitch?"
• Checks if it's spam. Generic sales messages, test submissions, obvious bots—filtered out before they become tickets.
• Catches duplicates. Even when the wording's different, it can tell "wait, we already have a ticket about this person's payment issue."
• Routes correctly from the start. Understands that "having trouble with the API" is different from "interested in learning about your API" even though both mention API.

Only the stuff that actually needs to be a ticket becomes a ticket. Everything else gets handled differently—or not at all.

Real example: what changes

I'll give you a concrete example from a team I worked with. B2B SaaS, about 200 employees, getting absolutely hammered with form submissions.

Before: drowning in tickets

After: pre-filtering running

The math is pretty simple. Cut out 100+ junk tickets per day = 500+ fewer tickets per week that nobody has to read, close, or route.

Common questions about pre-filtering

"What if it blocks a real ticket?"

This is the first thing everyone asks. Fair question. The answer: you monitor it, especially at first. Most systems have a "needs review" queue for anything they're not 100% sure about.

In practice, I've seen way more problems from spam getting through than legitimate tickets getting blocked. And it's easier to rescue one false positive than to sort through 100 spam tickets daily.

"Don't I already have spam filtering?"

Maybe. If your Zendesk has some basic filtering turned on. But that's catching the obvious stuff—the "you won a prize!" emails. It's not catching the sophisticated spam that looks like legitimate business correspondence. And it's definitely not helping with duplicates or misrouting.

"Does this mean changing my whole Zendesk setup?"

Nope. That's the thing—your Zendesk stays exactly the same. The filtering happens before stuff gets to Zendesk, so from your team's perspective, the inbox just suddenly has less crap in it. All your existing views, macros, reporting—none of that changes.

When to know you need this

You'll know it's time to look at pre-filtering when:

• • Your team spends over an hour daily just closing spam tickets
• • You regularly find important tickets that sat in the queue too long
• • People dread opening Zendesk because of the volume
• • You keep adding automation rules but tickets still get misrouted
• • Someone suggests hiring more support people to "help with the load"
• • Your Zendesk metrics look terrible (high volume, slow response times) but you know a lot of it is just noise

Basically, if you're managing spam inside Zendesk instead of preventing it from getting there in the first place, you're doing it the hard way.