How to Block an Email Address or Sender in the Mail App for Mac

Getting spam and unwanted email is still as prevalent as ever. Spam filters keep getting better, but there are still plenty of unwanted emails that get through. Let’s take a look at some things you can do to get rid of it.

Most promotional emails these days have an option to unsubscribe. There is usually a link towards the bottom of their emails, that you can click on that takes you to a webpage to unsubscribe from their mailing list.

This is generally fine to do for reputable companies, but you always want to be careful opening links in emails. Especially if it looks scammy. And even when you do unsubscribe, it sometimes doesn’t seem to work. You may realize you keep getting emails from the same place.

This is where blocking an email address comes in handy.

You can’t technically block emails in macOS’ Mail app, but you can make all emails from a particular sender or domain go straight to the trash so you never see them again. Can’t see the instructional video below? Watch it on YouTube here.

How to Block a Sender in Mac Mail

1. Open Mac Mail.
2. Click Mail in the top menu bar.
3. Open Preferences from the drop-down menu.
4. Find the Rules tab and click on it.
5. Select Add Rule and choose From Contains as the criteria.
6. To block a specific sender, type in the unwanted sender’s email address and make sure you include the ‘@’ symbol and domain.
7. Once you’ve done this, click Delete Message under the Perform the Following Actions option to have all messages from the unwanted sender automatically sent to the delete folder.
8. Type in a “Description” for the rule, so you can recognize who your newly created rule is blocking. It’ll come in handy if you want to unblock that person or company later on down the line.
9. Select OK.
10. If you want to retroactively delete all messages from the email address you just blocked, click Apply in the popup window. Close the Rules window and you’re all set!
11. Repeat these steps for all senders you don’t want to hear from.

What’s even better is blocking emails from an entire domain (it’s what you see following the @ symbol in an email address).

To do this, simply leave off the email address and type in the domain name. This will stop all senders from that domain, even if they have multiple email address.