How to Block Emails in Gmail (2026): 4 Clicks, and Where Blocked Mail Really Goes

Block a sender on desktop

1. Open any email from the sender you want to block.
2. Click the three-dot menu in the top right of the message (next to the Reply arrow).
3. Click Block “[sender name]”.
4. Confirm with Block in the pop-up.

Every future email from that exact address now lands in Spam. Google’s help page describes the feature in one line, “After you block a sender, all future emails from them go to Spam,” and that line is the whole feature. What it skips is what happens to the mail once it’s there, and the senders a per-address block can’t touch. Both below.

Block a sender on iPhone or Android

1. Open the Gmail app and open an email from the sender.
2. Tap the three-dot menu in the top right of the message (in the message header, next to the sender, not the one in the app bar).
3. Tap Block [sender name].

Same effect, and it syncs: blocking on your phone blocks them on your laptop too.

What blocking does (and doesn’t)

The block button does less than the word “block” implies, in three specific ways:

Blocked mail isn’t deleted: it goes to Spam. The sender’s messages still arrive; they just land in your Spam folder, where Gmail auto-deletes them after 30 days. If you check your Spam folder, you’ll still see them. There is no Gmail setting that makes mail from a sender bounce or disappear entirely. The closest thing is a filter with the “Delete it” action, covered below, and even that only moves mail to Trash, which Gmail likewise empties after 30 days: you’re choosing which folder holds the mail for a month, not whether it exists.

The sender isn’t notified. Nothing is sent back. They’ll never know unless they notice you stopped replying, which, presumably, was already the plan.

Blocking is per-address, not per-person or per-company. Block jake@acmesales.com and mail from jake.smith@acmesales.com, jake@acmesales.io, and j.smith@try-acme.com all still comes through. Sales and outreach tools rotate sending addresses routinely, so against persistent cold outreach, blocking individual addresses is a treadmill. (For mail you once signed up for, the treadmill has an off-ramp: unsubscribing properly removes you at the source.)

Blocking a whole domain (the filter method)

Gmail’s block button can’t block a domain, but a filter can:

1. Click the gear icon → See all settings → Filters and Blocked Addresses.
2. Click Create a new filter.
3. In the From field, enter the domain with an @ in front: @acmesales.com.
4. Click Create filter, then choose what happens: Delete it (gone to Trash) or Skip the Inbox (Archive it) if you want a softer option.
5. Click Create filter to save.

One catch: the Gmail mobile app can’t create filters, so build the rule in a desktop browser. Two limits: Gmail caps you at 1,000 filters per account (per Google’s own API documentation), and a filter is reactive; you can’t write a rule for a domain you’ve never heard from. For the broader toolkit (report spam, unsubscribe, address hygiene), see our full guide to stopping spam in Gmail.

Block vs. mute vs. report spam: pick the right one

Gmail gives you four ways to make mail stop, and only one of them shrinks the problem:

The one that shrinks the problem is Report spam: it trains Gmail’s filter against the sender and message pattern, where block, mute, and filters just route mail around you. (Mute lives in the same three-dot menu as Block and silences a single conversation; the sender’s next new email arrives normally.)

The quick rule:

How to unblock someone

Changed your mind, or blocked the wrong address:

1. Gear icon → See all settings → Filters and Blocked Addresses.
2. Scroll to the blocked-addresses list at the bottom.
3. Click Unblock next to the address (or select several and unblock in one go).

You can also open one of their messages in Spam and click Unblock sender right there. Do it inside 30 days if you want to rescue anything they sent in the meantime. After that, Spam empties itself.

When blocking is the wrong tool

Blocking earns its keep against one fixed sender: the ex-vendor who won’t take a hint, the one particular human you’re done hearing from. It’s the wrong tool for the two kinds of sender that fill most inboxes:

• Cold outreach at scale. New sender, new domain, every time. By the time an address exists on your block list, its work is done, and the next send comes from somewhere else.
• Phishing. Blocking a phishing address does nothing; the next attempt never comes from the same place twice. It’s also the arm of the $12.5 billion in fraud Americans reported losing in 2024 that reaches you by email, which the FTC found was the most common way scammers made contact.

For those, you need something that judges each message on what it is rather than checking the address against a list you maintain by hand. That’s the gap our Sieve is built for. It sits behind Gmail’s own filter and classifies incoming mail as it arrives: cold outreach gets labeled Solicitor, phishing gets labeled Malicious, and both are archived out of your inbox. Labeled, not deleted: everything stays auditable in Gmail, and dragging a message back to your inbox teaches it not to do that again. Mail from people you know skips the AI entirely and is never read by it (the Privacy Policy covers exactly what is and isn’t processed). Gmail-only, from $10/month (15% off yearly), 7-day free trial.

Different problem, different tool: if you’re facing a backlog to bulk-delete rather than a daily stream, start with the five-way cleanup-tool head-to-head, which covers Clean Email and Mailstrom among others; the full spam-filter comparison maps the wider field.

And if it really is just three persistent senders? The block button above is free, and you’re done.