- the best way to change gmail spam settings is to manually create filters and mark emails as spam.
- as you mark emails as spam spam or safe, gmail should gradually learn which is which.
- If you’re the administrator of a Google Workspace enterprise account, you can also manage spam settings for your entire organization.
Over the years, applications like Gmail have gotten much better at detecting spam before it reaches your inbox. but in the quest to catch all the spam, gmail sometimes gets it wrong. the emails you really need will be marked as spam and spam will appear in your inbox.
Fortunately, you have a few different ways to change your gmail spam settings and make sure you only see the emails you want.
how to change gmail spam settings
There are a few ways to manage your gmail spam filter settings, but not all of them are available to all users.
manually sort your emails
The easiest way to control what gmail considers spam is to fix gmail when it sorts an email incorrectly.
In other words, if an email you really wanted gets put in your spam folder, open it and click report not spam or seems safe on the top. and if a spam email sneaks into your inbox, open it and click the three dots in the top right corner, then select report spam. in any case, gmail will sort it into the correct folder.
Whenever you do this, you are gradually teaching gmail’s algorithms to differentiate between spam and genuine emails. It’s not a perfect solution, but it’s a quick way to fix unique mistakes gmail makes.
use filters
If you’re still having trouble, try setting up some filters. In Gmail, filters allow you to automatically sort emails using criteria that you decide, not a robot.
For example, you can set up a filter that sends any email from an address you don’t know to a separate folder. maybe you want to automatically delete any email that contains the word “subscribe”. With enough attention to detail, you can filter almost any email.
To set up a filter, go to the gmail website (not the mobile app) and click the icon that looks like a bunch of switches on the right side of the search bar. this will open the “search options” menu, where you can set all the criteria you want to filter.
Once you’ve chosen your criteria, click create filter at the bottom of this menu. On the next page, choose what you want Gmail to do with emails that arrive in your filter: you can delete them, move them to a separate folder, automatically mark them as read, and more.
For more information, see our article on how to use folders and labels in gmail.
change your workplace settings
This last option is not available to everyone. But if you’re an administrator of an enterprise-grade Google Workspace account, you also have access to a robust set of spam filters.
To find these filters, go to the google admin console and sign in to your account. then click applications, then google workspace, then gmail and finally spam, phishing and malware . select the organization you’re trying to customize, then hover over the spam and click configure.
You can use the options here to create a list of “approved senders” whose messages are never considered spam, set up your mailbox to quarantine anything suspicious so you can review it later, and more. You can also just tell gmail to “be more aggressive” when dealing with spam, which will result in more messages being filtered.
When you’re done, click save at the bottom of the page. it may take up to a day for the changes to take effect.