Zoho Desk offers two distinct approaches to handling unwanted contacts: marking them as spam (which keeps them in your system but isolates their tickets) or permanently deleting them. Understanding the difference is crucial because each method serves a different purpose and has different consequences.
Why this matters
If your support inbox is flooded with newsletters, promotional emails, or malicious phishing attempts, spam contacts can bury legitimate customer issues. Marking contacts as spam prevents their current and future tickets from cluttering your main queue, while deletion is appropriate when you want to completely remove a contact and all associated records from Zoho Desk. Choosing the right approach depends on whether you might need to reference the contact's history later.
Step-by-step: Mark a contact as spam
Step 1. Log into your Zoho Desk account and navigate to the Customers module. [1]
Step 2. Open the contact you want to mark as spam. [1]
Step 3. Click the More Actions icon (three dots) in the upper-right corner of the page. [1]
Step 4. Select Mark Spam from the dropdown menu. [1]
Step 5. Click Mark As Spam to confirm your selection. [1]
Once marked, all current and future tickets from that contact will be labeled as spam and moved to the Spam Contacts view. [1] The contact will also be denied access to your help center, and any tickets they shared with other departments will be revoked. [1] If the contact has duplicate accounts using the same email address, those will be marked as spam too. [1]
Step-by-step: Delete a contact permanently
Step 1. Open the contact you want to delete from the Customers module. [4]
Step 2. Click the More Actions icon from the top pane. [4]
Step 3. Select Delete from the menu. [4]
Step 4. Click Delete to confirm. [4]
When you delete a contact, all of its tickets, activities, and time entries are moved to the Recycle Bin. [4] Note that you cannot delete contacts that were added as end users. [4]
Step-by-step: Unmark a contact as spam
If you need to reverse a spam marking, the process is straightforward.
Step 1. Go to the Customers module. [1]
Step 2. On the left pane under *All Views*, select Spam Contacts. [1]
Step 3. Open the contact you want to unmark. [1]
Step 4. Click Not Spam at the bottom of the Contact Details page. [1]
Step 5. A confirmation window will appear. Check Unmark existing tickets from this contact also as spam if you want to restore their previous tickets to normal status. [1]
Step 6. Click OK to confirm. [1]
Automatic spam detection
Zoho Desk can also handle spam detection without manual intervention. By default, the system scans all incoming tickets and automatically marks suspicious ones as spam, moving them to the Spam Tickets view so they don't clutter your regular queue. [1] Administrators (and agents with *Manage General Permissions*) can enable or disable this feature and choose from three detection strategies: mark only suspicious tickets as spam without flagging the contact, auto-mark both tickets and contacts, or mark tickets as spam while preserving contacts that have other valid tickets. [3] To configure this, go to Setup > Customization > General Settings, select Contacts from the left panel, and toggle the option on or off. [3]
*Note: Beam Help is independent expert support for Zoho, not official Zoho support.*
Common pitfalls
Marking a contact as spam is permanent until you manually unmark them—there's no automatic reversal. If you delete a contact by mistake, their data goes to the Recycle Bin but may not be recoverable depending on your retention settings. Also, marking a contact as spam affects all duplicate accounts with the same email address, so verify you're not blocking legitimate users before confirming.
What to check
- Confirm the contact is actually spam before marking or deleting—check their ticket history and email domain for signs of phishing or bot activity.
- If you marked a contact as spam, verify they no longer appear in your main Customers list and their tickets have moved to Spam Contacts.
- After deletion, check the Recycle Bin to ensure the contact was removed and confirm no legitimate tickets were lost.