Learn how to block and unblock mail messages from specific senders in Mail for the Mac.
Did you know you could block email messages from specific senders in the Mail app on the Mac? When you block them, you can set if you just want them flagged or if you want to move them directly to the trash. And, of course, you can unblock anyone you’ve blocked. See how to block and unblock mail messages from specific senders in this video for Mail on the Mac.
Video TranscriptIn this video, I’m going to show you how you can block mail messages from specific senders in the Mail app on the Mac. I’ll also show you how you can unblock those same people that you’ve blocked. Let’s see how we do this in the Mail app on the Mac. Let’s go to my Mac.So I’m in my Mail app here and I have a number of different mail messages. What I would like to do is block some of these mail messages. I no longer want to see any mail messages from Apple TV as an example. How do I block that sender? How do I tell the Mail app that I no longer want to receive any mail from Apple?
Well, all we need to do is just select the mail message. So I’m going to select this. And from here, what we do is we go to the upper right hand corner, where we have all of our different information about our mail message. We can see what the subject is. We can see who it’s from. We can see who it’s going to. But in addition to that, when I click on the little arrow to the right, we’re going to have a few more options.
One of them is Block Contact. All I have to do is just select Block Contact and what the Mail app will do then is block any mail messages coming from Apple TV at inside apple dot Apple dot com. So it’s going to block any mail message from this address. Let’s go ahead and do that. So I select Block Contact. And now I will no longer receive any more mail messages from that specific person.
If we go over to the mail message itself, you’re going to see it has a block icon next to the subject. This tells us that the person that sent this has been blocked from sending me future emails. Any emails I get from this person in the future will go into my trash. I can also set it to just keep it in my inbox and then show this icon here. But I prefer to have a go straight into the trash if I blocked someone. I’ll show you how you set that up later on in the lesson.
Let’s do that again. We’re going to go to Apple music. I select it, and again, we just go up to the top here and when it turns blue, you’re going to see there’s a little arrow to the right. And then I go to Block Contact. When I select this one, it’s going to block all mail messages from new, at apple music.com. I select it. And now I will no longer receive any mail messages from that specific person.
So that’s all there is to setting up an email address to be blocked.
Now we do have a few settings for this, including we can easily add anyone from our context to our block list and we can unblock people that we’ve already blocked to do that, what we do is we go up to our Mail Preferences. So I go up to Mail in the menu bar, and then we go over to Preferences. From here, what we need to do is go to Junk Mail. We need to go to our tab Junk Mail. Under Junk Mail, we have two more tabs. You’re going to see Junk Mail Behaviors and Blocked. You’ll want to select blocked.
From here we have a couple of different settings. I can set if I want to enable Blocked Mail Filtering. If you no longer want to block anyone, you can just turn this off. Also, what you can do is set what happens to that mail when you block it. You can have it marked as Blocked Mail, which means it’s going to mark it, but it’s going to remain in your inbox. So you’re still going to see it, but then you can also set it for Moving it to the Trash. This is what I would recommend. You’re blocking it. You do not want to see it. So just move it to the trash.
Below that you can see all of the different email addresses that you’ve blocked. I want to unblock any one of them, I just select it, and then I go down to the minus and it’ll unblock it. I would then start receiving mail messages from that specific person. You can also add anyone to this list here from your contacts app. So if you want to block someone from your contacts app, all you have to do is just click on the plus here and select which contact you want to block.
So that’s how you block mail messages from specific senders in the Mail app on the Mac. You first have to select the mail message from the sender you want to block, you go up to the sender’s name, click on the arrow, and you’re going to see block. Just select that, and any new messages from that specific sender will no longer go into your inbox. There are a few settings for this, and you can also unblock someone. You just go to Mail Preferences, Junk Mail tab, and then Blocked. From there, you can set if you want to enable blocking at all. And then you can also manage all of your blocked email addresses.
So that’s how you can block mail messages from specific centers in the Mail app on the Mac.