Google adds email blocking feature to Gmail

PanARMENIAN.Net - Google said Tuesday, September 22, that users will now be able to “block” specific email addresses—except that they’re not really blocked, and Google already has more powerful tools to eradicate offensive email that are already in Gmail, PCWorld reports. As of Tuesday, “blocking” an email will actually send an email from that specific email address to the spam folder—where it will technically live on, even if no one really checks their spam folder.

Gmail, however, does allow users to set up an automated filter to take email from specific senders and apply various rules to it, including deleting it. PCWorld presents how to do it:

In your inbox, select one or more messages using the little checkboxes to the left of the message. At the top of the list of messages, you’ll see a number of icons with drop-down menus. Click More . > Filter messages like these.

That will open up a screen, pre-populated with the email addresses of the senders of the emails you highlighted. Note that you can also add specific words in the fields—the subject line, and more, if you want to fine-tune this further.

Where this gets confusing—and this is possibly the reason for the new Block command—is that clicking Create filter with this search does not actually create the filter.

Instead, it takes you to a second page, where you have a number of options to apply to the message. The one you’ll want, in this case, is Delete. Granted, deleting an email means that it’s gone forever. But if you’re desperate to never hear from a particular email address ever again, you’ve found a possible solution.