Bye-Bye, Spam! How to Block Annoying Senders in Apple Mail on iOS

In this episode, Thomas Domville demonstrates a handy feature in the Mail app on your iPhone: Block Sender. Block Sender is a feature in the Mail app that allows you to prevent emails from specific senders from reaching your inbox. Once you block a sender, their emails will either be automatically deleted or sent to your Trash folder, depending on your settings.

There are many reasons why you might want to block senders such as:

Spam: This is the most common reason. Block those unwanted marketing emails and get your inbox back under control.
Unsubscribe Nightmare: Tried unsubscribing but the emails keep coming? Blocking is a more forceful solution.
Unwanted Contacts: Maybe you have an ex or someone you no longer want to hear from. Blocking cuts off email communication.

How to Block Senders in Mail (iOS):

Find the Mail app and locate an email from the sender you want to block.
Swipe down to the More option and double tap to bring up a menu.
Locate the Block Sender option and double tap it.

Bonus Tip!

You can also manage your blocked senders list in the Settings app:

Go to Settings > Mail.
Double tap on "Blocked".
Here you can see a list of all your blocked senders and even unblock them if you need to.

transcription:
Disclaimer: This transcript is generated by AIKO, an automated transcription service. It is not edited or formatted, and it may not accurately capture the speakers’ names, voices, or content.

Hello and welcome.

My name is Thomas Domville, also known as AnonyMouse.

In this podcast, I'm going to introduce you to a feature called Block Sender that you can find within your mail app for iOS.

Now, I will admit in recent years, some of the mail services that I use have done a great job.

Definitely a huge improvement over many years ago when we used to get tons of spams and unwanted emails, right?

Things have gotten a lot better.

You don't get as nearly as much as you used to, but there's still a few that kind of slides in and you find those in within your spam folder and et cetera.

Sometimes they don't even make it to the spam folder.

Comes right into your inbox.

I'm going to show you how to block a sender.

Now, obviously there are many different scenarios why you would want a blocks of sender.

Perhaps it is a spam or an unwanted mail or perhaps it is unwanted mail, but from somebody that you know that just persistently send you an email and there's you just want those particular emails go directly to the trash can.

All right, let's just do that.

I'm going to go to my mail app here.

I have one particular mail that I would like to place on a block sender and I will show you how to do that and why I'm doing it for this particular mail.

Mail.

No one read emails.

Double tap to open.

So I'm going to do that.

One finger double tap to open up my mail app here.

Mail.

Search.

Search field.

Double tap to edit.

Now let's go to the particular mail that I was talking about in question that I like to block.

I'm going to go to the right here.

Dictate button.

Double tap to start dictation.

Double tap with two fingers when finished.

Sam's club.

See what's up at your club.

10.03 a.m. this week.

All right, I'm going to pause that right there.

Here is a great example.

Sam's club.

Now I was a Sam club member at one point and I am no longer a Sam club member and they still send me membership information and things like that just to try to lure you back in.

What's weird about this is that most of the ones that I get and I want to get rid of typically have a at the bottom of the email that you can unsubscribe or change the type of notification.

However, this one does but it's inaccessible.

So I'm going to go to that site to change the notification.

It's not accessible to us.

I'm not able to unsubscribe or change the notification.

So this is a great example.

Or sometimes you get spam that you just kind of be leery.

You know what I mean?

You don't want to kind of unscribe that even though there is a button.

Sometimes that's kind of a lure just to see if you really are reading these things and they'll just sign you up for other things and send you those spammy kind of mail.

Or just say you just got a person you just don't want to receive anymore.

All right, now there's a number of ways to doing this.

You could do one finger double tap and hold and that will present a set of items on a menu.

In my case, I'm just going to swipe down until I get to more.

So we're on the email that we want to block.

So just swipe down until you get to more.

Archive.

Mark is unread.

Flag.

More.

Double tap.

Sam's club.

This week's featured finds and low price.

Now we're going to swipe to the right until we get to block sender.

Close.

Button.

Reply.

Reply all.

Forward.

Archive message.

Remind me.

Flag.

Mark is unread.

Move message.

Trash message.

Move to junk.

Now, before I get there, move to junk.

Would that be the same thing?

No, it's not.

So what the difference is, is that if you send it to junk, that means that you will always get that email into your junk folders.

That means I still have to go through the junk folder and weed through it because every so often I have to go through the junk mail because something gets into that folder that I want to keep.

I don't want to keep seeing the Sam's email in that particular folder.

I don't want it to go directly to the trash.

So the block sender is more aggressive.

So that's just going to send it directly to the trash.

Mute.

Notify me.

Block sender.

Once we get to the block sender, double tap.

Mailboxes.

Back button.

Voila.

Now it has been blocked.

Go ahead and delete that message.

And then from now on, if you get an email from, say, Sam's Club, it will be now in the trash.

You will never be able to see it again.

And that's the beautiful part.

And that's exactly what I want.

I don't want to see it again.

However, if you feel that's like a mistake and I do want to unblock him, say you have blocked a person and you decided to reverse that, no problem.

Let's head out of here and go to settings here.

Mail.

Settings.

Double tap to open.

Double tap on settings.

Settings.

Settings.

Heading.

Now swipe to the right until you get to the mail.

Mail.

Button.

And double tap on this.

Allow mail to access.

Heading.

What we're looking for is the block section.

And the easiest way to get to this is just set your order to headings and we are going to go down until we find the compose heading.

Message list.

Heading.

Messages.

Heading.

Threading.

Heading.

Composing.

Heading.

And then from here, go left.

So I'm going to swipe left.

Blocked.

Button.

Voila.

There's your block.

However, I do want to show something just to you just for you to know if you swipe left one more time here.

Block sender options.

Move to trash.

Button.

By default, it's going to move to trash.

Nonetheless, you now know you need to double check to make sure that is being sent to trash.

If it's not, double tap there and find trash.

Double tap that and then go back to this page and then go to the right to get to the block.

Button.

Blocked.

Button.

Double tap here.

Sam's Club at m.samsclub.com.

Button.

Swipe up or down to select a custom action.

Then double tap to activate.

Beautiful.

So that is the first one on the list and this allows you to see that it did indeed get blocked and it is on this list.

Now if you at any time you feel like, wow, I don't want to block that person.

I just want to unblock it.

Feel free to come in here, go to the particular email that you would like to unblock and then swipe up.

Unblock.

And double tap and that will give you the option to unblock that person or email in particular.

Now a word of note and a kind of a weird thing how Apple decided to handle this is that you're able to block in various apps other than mail.

So you can block senders and texts.

You can block phone numbers and etc like that.

So remember when you come in here, you may see a variety of different things that you have blocked in various Apple apps.

Have no fear.

That is the intended results.

They decided to clump all of those into one area.

How weird is that?

Because if you go to the right here, add new button, you'll find the add new.

Obviously you can add new.

If you know the email phone numbers, etc in advance and you want to go ahead and block that particular person or email, you can do that manually instead of doing automated.

Now if you go to the right one more time, you will not receive phone calls, messages, email or FaceTime from people on the block list.

So that just gives you a kind of a blanket statement that everything on here applies to all of the different segments that you are able to block on your iOS.

So that is how to use the block sender feature within the mail app itself and why you would want to use it.

And for myself, this is great.

Very useful.

I still get a few that little stragglers here and there that I just can't seem to describe or I'm just not comfortable and clicking that little link.

So this option is perfect for that situation.

Alright, well that is going to do.

My name is Thomas Donville, also known as AnonyMouse.

Until next time.

Bye bye.