Yahoo Mail: How to filter and block email addresses

Martin Brinkmann
Jan 8, 2014
Updated • Oct 15, 2016
Email
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31

Yahoo Mail, like most email providers, offers options to filter or block email messages that you receive.

The difference between filtering emails and blocking them is easy to explain: A filter moves the messages to another folder on the site, e.g. a custom folder that you have created, or the trash.

Blocking email addresses on the other hand prevents emails from those addresses from reaching your account. They are rejected and therefore do not land in your inbox, spam folder or any other folder that you may have created.

Blocking has a higher priority than filtering, which means that any filters that you may have created for blocked email addresses won't run anymore.

Filtering emails

yahoo mail add filter
Yahoo Mail filters

There are several reasons why you may want to filter emails on Yahoo Mail. Here is a small selection:

  • You may want to move mails from specific senders to a custom folder to get a better overview.
  • To archive select emails in the same location.
  • To move select emails directly to trash.
  • To move unimportant emails out of the inbox folder.

To filter an email on Yahoo, do the following:

  1. Right-click the email in question and select Filter emails like this from the context menu.
  2. This opens the Add Filter dialog on the screen.
  3. Part of it is already filled out with information taken from the selected email. This includes usually the name and sender (email address).
  4. You can make modifications here if you want, for instance to filter only emails from that sender that have a specific subject line, or body text.
  5. As far as filtering options go, you can define that the email should contain, should not contain, begins with or ends with select strings.
  6. This can be useful to create a catch all filter for example. Say you want to filter out email addresses from a specific domain. Simply type only the domain name in the sender field to do so.
  7. The only thing you need to configure as well is the destination folder you want the emails to be moved to. This can be any custom folder, the inbox folder, or the trash.

Blocking email addresses

yahoo-block-email-addresses
blocked addresses

There are situations where you may want to block emails that originate from an address right away. Maybe you are receiving lots of spam from that address or someone is harassing you.

Whatever the reason, blocking email address is an effective counter-measure as it makes sure that you won't receive emails from the selected address anymore.

Update: The new interface looks like this. The main change is that the entry is called banned addresses now and no longer blocked addresses.

yahoo ban email

To block email addresses on Yahoo, do the following:

  1. Click on the settings icon in the upper right corner of the screen next to your screen name and select Settings from the context menu.
  2. This opens the settings menu. Navigate to Banned Addresses.
  3. To block an address, simply enter it under Add an address and click on the block button afterwards.
  4. Note that you need to enter a full email address. Wildcards or partial emails are not accepted.

You can unblock an email address at any time by selecting it here and a click on the remove button.

Summary
Yahoo Mail: How to filter and block email addresses
Article Name
Yahoo Mail: How to filter and block email addresses
Description
The guide walks you through the steps of filtering emails on Yahoo Mail, or blocking email addresses and thus emails from those addresses.
Author
Publisher
Ghacks Technology News
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Comments

  1. JMGG said on January 19, 2012 at 8:25 am
    Reply

    You said that Outlook isn’t your main email client, so which is your main one?

    1. BalaC said on January 19, 2012 at 9:42 am
      Reply

      I think its thunderbird

    2. Martin Brinkmann said on January 19, 2012 at 10:15 am
      Reply

      It is Mozilla Thunderbird.

  2. Salaam said on September 24, 2012 at 9:52 pm
    Reply

    Awesome! This actually solved my problem… what a stupid bug.

  3. Claud said on December 19, 2012 at 2:08 am
    Reply

    If this is the same bug that I’ve encountered, there may be another fix: (1) hover over open Outlook item in Taskbar, cursor up to hover over Outlook window item, and right-click; (2) this should give you Restore / Move / Size / Minimize / Maximize — choose Move or Size; (3) use your cursor keys, going arbitrarily N/S/E/W, to try to move or size the Outlook window back into view. Basically, the app behaves as though it were open in a 0x0 window, or at a location that’s offscreen, and this will frequently work to resize and/or move the window. Don’t forget to close while resized/moved, so that Outlook remembers the size/position for next time.

    1. Lynda said on February 12, 2013 at 3:37 pm
      Reply

      THANK YOU Claude!!! I could get the main window to launch but could not get any other message window to show on the desktop. You are my hero!!!!

    2. Chad said on November 20, 2018 at 4:24 pm
      Reply

      Solved my issue! 6 years later and this is still problem…

    3. Ivan X said on January 21, 2021 at 4:50 pm
      Reply

      Fantastic. Thank you. Size did the trick.

  4. Andrew said on October 26, 2013 at 7:06 am
    Reply

    This solved my Outlook problem, too. Thank you. :)

  5. Charles said on December 7, 2013 at 7:23 pm
    Reply

    Thank you so much, this started happening to me today and was causing big problems. You are a life saver, I hope I can help you in some way some day.

  6. garth said on November 7, 2014 at 7:13 pm
    Reply

    You are a god – thank you!

  7. Faisal said on February 9, 2015 at 10:09 am
    Reply

    thanks a lot…. work like charm.. :-)

  8. Simon said on March 24, 2015 at 11:36 pm
    Reply

    Yah…thanks Claude. I’ve been having the same problem and tried all the suggestions…your solution was the answer. It had resized itself to a 0/0 box. Cheers

  9. Olu said on April 14, 2015 at 1:35 pm
    Reply

    Excellent post. This had me baffled even trying to accurately describe the problem. This fixed it for me.
    Thank you

  10. Coenig said on July 23, 2015 at 7:36 am
    Reply

    Thanks a lot for the article. Don’t know why it happenend, don’t know how it got fixed, but it was really annoying and now it works :-)

  11. Fali said on January 20, 2016 at 4:19 pm
    Reply

    Thanks a lot. I was facing this issue from past 3 week. I tried everything but no resolution. The issue was happening intermittently and mainly when I was changing the display of screen ( as i use 2 monitors). The only option i had was to do system restore. But thanks to you.

    1. MIki said on January 10, 2019 at 11:54 am
      Reply

      I’ve been tried to sole this problem for 12hours. Your comment about changing the display of screen helped me a lot!! Thanks!!

  12. Christina said on January 20, 2016 at 6:14 pm
    Reply

    Thank you…don’t know why this happened but your instructions helped me fix it. Running Windows 10 and office pro 2007

  13. Oz said on July 22, 2016 at 3:20 pm
    Reply

    Great tip! Thanks!

  14. Tracy said on September 1, 2016 at 4:48 pm
    Reply

    Worked for me, too – thank you!!!

  15. shawn said on September 9, 2016 at 10:25 am
    Reply

    It’s Worked for me, too
    thank you very much!

  16. Jari said on October 31, 2016 at 11:53 am
    Reply

    I had a similar issue with Outlook 2013 on Windows 10 and this helped me to fix it. Thank you very much!

  17. Michel H said on November 30, 2016 at 11:08 pm
    Reply

    Thank you so much. Solved!
    Considering you published this in 2012, incredible not been debugged by Microsoft.
    Thank you again. M

  18. Ziad Bitar said on January 9, 2017 at 2:00 am
    Reply

    This problem was faced by only one user logging to TS 2008 r2 using outlook 2010.The issue was resolved.

    Thanks.

  19. Anonymous said on February 15, 2017 at 5:24 pm
    Reply

    Great tip. Thank you!!!! If it helps, I had to use the Control Key and the arrow keys at the same time to bring my window back into view. Worked like a charm.

  20. Rochelle said on March 6, 2017 at 11:59 am
    Reply

    Thank you, this worked !!!!

  21. anom1234 said on May 20, 2018 at 11:20 pm
    Reply

    Man, you are a fucking god. Thanks a lot, what an annoying bug!!

  22. JC said on October 12, 2020 at 2:14 pm
    Reply

    Awesome, this post solved the issue. Many thanks!

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