How can I reject email from unwanted senders?

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Summary: Rejecting email from specific unwanted senders turns out to be surprisingly difficult unless your mail provider or email program supports it directly.

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The short answer is "it depends".

It depends on your email provider, it depends on the email program you use, and it depends on the source of the email.

While I don't know the specific answers for your situation, I can offer a few ideas and places to look.

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If you honestly mean that you never want the email to reach your system, then your only recourse is your email provider. Specifically, you'll need to see if they provide you with any way to set up what's called "blacklist".

You may have heard of "whitelists" where you add email addresses that you know to always be valid. If your email provider supports it, email from addresses you place on your whitelist are never checked for spam.

Blacklists are the exact opposite. By placing an email address on your blacklist you're telling your email provider to never accept email originating from that email address.

In other words, it sounds pretty much like exactly what you're looking for.

There are two problems:

• Not all email providers support blacklists. In fact, from what I've seen, few actually do.

• Email rejected by being on a blacklist may generate a rejection message to the sender. You might not want that.

In either case, the only one who can answer the question of whether or not a blacklist is available to you, and how blacklist rejections are handled, is your email provider. Check with them.

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Okay, so what if your email provider doesn't provide blacklisting? Well, you'll at least have to deal with the email in your email program. If you download your email, that means it'll reach your system - sorry.

Some email programs actually provide the equivalent of blacklists in conjunction with spam filtering features, and that's where I'd start. By adding the email address to your email program's blacklist any email from that address will be routed directly to either the trash or your junk mail folder. In either case, you won't have to see it.

Another approach is to use "Rules". Rules are a feature of some email programs that allow you have the program automatically take action on email messages based on criteria that you specify. While they're typically used for other things, in email programs that support this feature it should be fairly easy to say "if a message arrives coming from this email address, delete it". Again, the result is that you should never see the message.

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Your ISP doesn't support blacklists, and your email program doesn't support blacklists or rules?

Then you're kind of stuck.

You could, I suppose, start marking email from that address as spam, but the problem is that over time that could cause other email - other legitimate email - to also start getting marked as spam. Probably not what you want.

In these cases, about all I can say is that the Delete key is your friend.

Related:

• Ask Leo! - How do I get rid of all this spam?!?!

• Ask Leo! - Does spam blocking prevent spam from reaching my machine?

• Taming Email - The Most Under-Used Key on Your Keyboard

Article C3103 - August 1, 2007