Auto-manage: automatically handling contacts based on behavior
Instead of manually setting every contact’s state, Auto-manage watches your spam feedback and automatically updates contact states when patterns become clear. It saves you time by handling the routine contact management you’d otherwise do yourself.
Where to find Auto-manage
Click Intelligence in the sidebar. When AI Protection is enabled, you’ll see an Auto-manage section on the page. This is where you enable the feature and configure its thresholds.
How it works
Auto-manage keeps track of the spam feedback you give on incoming messages:
- When you mark messages from a sender as “not spam” repeatedly, Auto-manage counts those positive signals. Once the count reaches your whitelist threshold, the contact is automatically set to whitelisted.
- When you mark messages from a sender as “spam” repeatedly, once the count reaches your block threshold, the contact is automatically set to blocked.
Only contacts in the unset state are affected. Contacts you’ve already manually configured — whitelisted, blocked, or otherwise — are never changed by Auto-manage.
Configuring thresholds
You can adjust two thresholds to control how quickly Auto-manage acts:
Whitelist threshold
This sets how many “not spam” marks are needed before a contact is auto-whitelisted. The default is 10, and you can set it anywhere from 5 to 50.
Block threshold
This sets how many “spam” marks are needed before a contact is auto-blocked. The default is 20, and you can set it anywhere from 5 to 50.
The block threshold is intentionally higher than the whitelist threshold. Blocking is a more aggressive action — you want to be more certain before automatically rejecting all future mail from a sender.
Adjust these based on your volume. If you process a lot of email and give frequent feedback, lower thresholds work well. If you rarely mark messages, keep the thresholds higher so Auto-manage doesn’t act on too little data.
What happens when a contact is auto-managed
- Auto-whitelisted: future messages from this sender skip spam checks, Gatekeeper, and rate limits — exactly the same as if you had whitelisted the contact manually.
- Auto-blocked: future messages from this sender are rejected immediately — exactly the same as a manual block.
You can always override an auto-managed contact by changing its state manually. Your manual choice takes priority over Auto-manage.
Tips for getting the most out of Auto-manage
- Give consistent spam feedback. The more you mark messages as spam or not spam, the faster Auto-manage learns your preferences.
- Review auto-managed contacts occasionally. Visit your Contacts page to see which contacts Auto-manage has whitelisted or blocked on your behalf.
- Don’t worry about mistakes. If Auto-manage gets one wrong, just change the contact’s state manually. Once you do, Auto-manage won’t touch that contact again.
