Yahoo Mail: How to filter and block email addresses

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

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

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.

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.

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