Legitimate emails end up in spam every day. SpamRescue monitors your spam folder and surfaces the ones that matter — without you ever opening it.
SpamRescue connects via IMAP — the same secure protocol your email client uses. We read only the email envelope: sender name, sender address, subject line, and authentication headers (SPF, DKIM, DMARC). The body of your emails is never accessed, never stored, and never transmitted. Passwords are AES-encrypted at rest. All connections use SSL/TLS on port 993. Supported providers include Gmail, Yahoo Mail, iCloud, AOL, Fastmail, Google Workspace, Zoho Mail, and any standard IMAP server. Major providers such as Gmail and Yahoo require an App Password rather than your regular account password — the setup guide walks you through it step by step.
A scoring engine analyzes each message using sender signals, subject content, reply history, mailing list flags, and email authentication results (SPF pass/fail, DKIM, DMARC). Messages scoring 2 or higher appear in Likely Rescue — these are the ones worth moving to your inbox. Lower-scoring messages appear in Review — plausible but less certain. Every score has a breakdown you can inspect. Nothing moves until you decide: rescue it, hide it, or delete it. The first pass typically surfaces emails spanning weeks that were never seen.
In email filtering, ham is the term for legitimate, wanted email — the opposite of spam. Ham keywords increase a message's score — useful for industry jargon, product lines, client names, geographic terms, and anything legitimate that spam filters tend to flag. Spam keywords decrease the score, helping filter out newsletters and promotions you genuinely don't need rescued. Keywords are matched against subject line and sender name. The score breakdown on every message shows exactly which signals fired and by how much. Adding a keyword immediately rescores all current active messages — the effect is visible in seconds. Most customers spend 10 to 15 minutes on keywords once, then rarely revisit them.
Enable auto-rescue in Settings and choose a score threshold (2 through 5). Any message at or above that threshold is automatically moved from spam to your inbox each night. A daily or weekly digest email summarizes what was rescued so nothing is a surprise. Most customers start at a threshold of 3 after one week of manual review, then raise or lower it based on results. For teams, an IT administrator sets this up once per mailbox — executives and staff never interact with spam folders at all. The digest becomes the only touchpoint: a short email each morning confirming what was found.
Without action, every email in your spam folder will expire unseen. You have nothing to lose by reviewing them — and potentially a great deal to recover.
Your inbox is the final filter. A human can always delete a rescued email in one second. Set your threshold generously — err on the side of rescue.
Keywords, thresholds, and digest settings can all be adjusted in minutes. It is not a one-time decision — the system improves as your business changes.