How do I control spam?

We implemented the automation so that if it contained any Cyrillic characters the ticket would be delete. However recently this has stopped working. Over the weekend we got three Russian language tickets come through. 

Is there a reason that this should have stopped working?

I am in the same boat as everyone else, just mounds of spam, and as I am on one of the middle tier plans I am unable to do any of the other recommended solutions in other posts and have just had to set it to automatically bin off tickets past a certain date that are open with russian characters, but its thousands and every day it keeps happening. It is making the system unusable and as mentioned this is a paid for service that has had this problem over 6 years and it keeps getting worse.

As much as I would rather stay with freshdesk, if its gonna waste 30 mins each day trying to prune new spam im just gonna have to call it a day and go elsewhere which is more of a faff, I would love to stay, just make the spam go away... or unfortunately I imagine a lot of us will be going instead :(

We are having the same issue. It appears that Freshdesk are not willing to address this. We are going to begin looking elsewhere for a company willing to address issues like this.

UP

I just installed freshdesk before project released, and I already have 6000+ spam messages. WTF 

We are experiencing a similar problem. Each day for the past week, we receive anywhere between a few hundred to thousands of blatant Russian spam messages. They hit us between midnight and 6am, and it's become a real nuisance. I've been communicating with FreshDesk support through their little chat popup, and while they're quick to respond and always sign off with "My pleasure! Have a great day!" (not appropriate tone for a frustrated customer), the advice has seemed somewhat half-baked.

For starters, since the spam tickets are being generated by emailing our old default FreshDesk support email (we've since changed the address to try to mitigate this) they suggest a Dispach'r rule that will mark any emails received to that account as SPAM. Fair enough. If you decide to go this route, don't forget that Dispach'r rules are executed in sequential order! If this rule isn't at the top of the list, it'll likely be ineffective. I just learned that lesson the hard way. My fault though.

Secondly, they claimed to have now "activated" their spam filtering feature on our account. However, they also tell me there is no way to interact with this feature. They they activated it yesterday, and since then we've been blasted with 5000+ spam emails. So from a customer's perspective it's not intuitive. They tell me that the system needs to first analyze the pattern of incoming messages, and based on that, it would start working. So that still requires spam to arrive, be marked as 'spam', and supposedly the filtering system would start to work. Theoretically, the Dispach'r rule would automate this so we wouldn't wake up to this soul crushing pile of spam each morning. We're still in the thick of it, so we'll see. BTW, why does is something as important as spam filtering have to be manually turned on at our request? Shouldn't it be a standard feature?

We're frustrated with this and are also arriving at the point where we're going to start considering other options.

Unfortunately it seems that Freshdesk is not willing to do any standard Spam checking/filtering. Considering how many standard solutions are out there, both open source and commercial, this is disappointing. We just got 2000+ blatant spam emails into our system in a matter of hours. They were in a different language, blatant spam, and from blacklisted domains. Using even something like Spam Assassin would have caught and blocked this. Considering many of your competitors have systems in place that would have caught this, it has come time for us to look in one of those directions and bite the bullet now versus later. This thread is 5 years old and nothing serious has been put in place, yet you found time to pretty up the site.

We received almost 1000 spam tickets this morning, all within a few seconds of the same time, around 5:30am.  They all consist of 2 or 3 lines of Russian characters, but they are all different content from different email addresses.  It was a nightmare today to mark them all as spam.  Luckily, the rapid fire arrival and non-business-hours time prevented valid tickets from being interwoven with spam tickets.  If they did this same thing more slowly in the middle of the day it would have been even worse.  And this was BAD.

This alone is reason to consider handling tickets some other way.  The productivity loss and manpower required to sift through spam is very expensive.