Protecting Yourself From Spam
| Avoiding Spam | Blocking Images | Blocking Email Addresses |
Blocking Email Addresses
Are you tired of getting email from certain senders? Do you find it a bother having to delete unwanted emails or to move them into the Spam folder? Yahoo! Mail can help you out with a handy feature that lets you list email addresses that you would like blocked from your Yahoo! Mail account. When emails arrive from addresses that you’ve blocked, Yahoo! Mail automatically deletes them. The emails never make it to one of your mail folders, not even your Spam folder, and they aren’t bounced back to the sender. If you want to block messages from a particular source, just list the sender’s specific address or entire domain. As long as the sender always uses the same mailing address or domain, this type of blocking is very effective.
Note: Blocking an address is different from marking a message as spam. When you mark a message as spam, Mail moves the message into the Spam folder and continues to deliver messages from that address into your Spam folder. When you block an address, you manually put the address into your blocked addresses list, and Yahoo! Mail deletes all messages from that address before you have an opportunity to view them. To learn more about spam and SpamGuard, see the Using SpamGuard tutorial.
Here’s How
In the upper-right corner of your Yahoo! Mail page, click the Options link, then select Mail Options from the menu.
The Mail Options page opens.
Click the Spam link on the left.
The spam options open on the right side of the page. The Blocked Email Addresses area shows all the addresses and domains that you have currently blocked.
In the Add a blocked address box, type the email address you wish to block, then click the Add button.
Tip: To block email messages from an entire domain (for example, baddomain.com), type the domain in this box.
The address is added to on the list.
To remove or unblock an address or domain from your list, select the entry to remove, then click the Remove button.
The address or domain disappears from your list of blocked addresses.
What’s Next:
Blocking specific addresses is not a particularly good strategy for preventing random spam because proficient spammers constantly change the addresses and domains that they use. But it can be a useful strategy if you get repeated junk messages from the same sender and want to block them.
Click one of the Learn More links below to learn more about Yahoo! Mail’s other anti-spam tools.
Words to Know
- Blocked address: an email address or domain from which you never want to receive messages.
- Domain: a set of Internet addresses, such as for a web site or email. On the Web, a domain is the part after "www." such as "my-domain.com".
- Folder: a container that holds individual elements specific to the context; for example, email messages in Yahoo! Mail.
- Spam: unsolicited email on the Internet; also called "junk mail".
- Spammer: someone who sends spam.