Over the years, apps like Gmail have gotten a lot better about detecting spam before it ever hits your inbox. But in the quest to catch all spam, Gmail sometimes gets things wrong. Emails that you actually need will get marked as spam, and junk mail appears in your inbox.
Luckily, you've got a few different ways to change Gmail's spam settings and make sure you only see the emails you want.
How to change Gmail's spam settings
There are a few ways to manage Gmail's 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 correct Gmail when it sorts an email incorrectly.
In other words, if an email that you actually wanted gets put into the Spam folder, open it and click Report not spam or Looks safe at 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 either case, Gmail will then sort it into the right folder.
Whenever you do this, you're gradually teaching Gmail's algorithms to tell the difference between spam and genuine emails. It's not a perfect solution, but it's a quick way to correct one-off mistakes Gmail makes.
Use filters
If you're still having issues, try setting up some filters. In Gmail, filters let you 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 out nearly any email.
To set up a filter, head 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 up all the criteria you want to filter.
Once you've picked your criteria, click Create filter at the bottom of this menu. On the next page, choose what you want Gmail to do with the emails that hit your filter — you can delete them, move them to a separate folder, automatically mark them as read, and more.
For more information, check out our article on how to use folders and labels in Gmail.
Change your workplace settings
This last option isn't available to everyone. But if you're an administrator for an enterprise-level Google Workspace account, you've also got access to a robust set of spam filters.
To find these filters, head to the Google Admin console and log into your account. Then click Apps, then Google Workspace, then Gmail, and then finally Spam, Phishing and Malware. Select the organization you're trying to customize, then mouse over Spam and click Configure.
You can use the options here to create a list of "approved senders" whose messages are never considered spam, set your mailbox to quarantine anything suspicious so you can review it later, and more. You can also simply tell Gmail to "Be more aggressive" when dealing with spam, which will result in more messages being filtered out.
When you're done, click Save at the bottom of the page. It can take up to a day for the changes to go into effect.
