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Sometimes it’s necessary to block a sender so you don’t receive any of their emails. Whether it’s to avoid a marketer who keeps spamming you or anyone else whose emails are bothering you. It’s a necessity of our current digital world where most of the communication happens online. We cannot attend to everyone. Prioritizing is the key!

This article will help you do the same in Thunderbird email client. The instructions/tutorial below will help blocking someone so their emails do not take up your time.

Blocking features in Thunderbird

Thunderbird does not have a direct “blocking” feature as such. But it does have a more advanced and flexible option to filter emails based on the set of criteria you set. You can apply any kind of filters to the incoming emails and decide the action you want to take on those emails. Such as: delete as soon as the emails arrive, archive them and skip inbox, move to a different folder, and more.

How to add a sender to a block list in Thunderbird?

  1. The best way to filter a specific email sender is to open a past email you have received from them.
  2. Right-click on the sender’s email address (next to ‘from’ on the header) and select “Create Filter From”
  3. Now you can see the dialog box for setting the rules/criteria for this particular filter.
    • Create a name for this filter (Such as, “Block Person X”)
    • Select when you want this filter to run: either automatically when checking for emails or if you want to manually run this filter whenever you see fit
    • Select the matching criteria for the various criteria you set:
      • Match all of the following criteria/rules
      • Match any one of the following criteria or the rule
      • Match all the messages
  4. Below, you can set multiple criteria to match. Since you right-click on the sender’s email address at the start, you will see that it is automatically listed.
  5. Finally, set the action you want to take on the messages that match the criteria. For our specific goal of blocking someone, you should select “delete message”

Now, whenever Thunderbird detects an incoming email message from this address, it will automatically delete it.

If you do not want to delete a message permanently, you can choose a different action (or set of multiple actions) in step 5. Like, “move message to a folder,” mark as read automatically, delete from POP server, etc.

Conclusion

Note that filters only work for the account on Thunderbird you used to create that particular filter. If there are other accounts, those filters do not affect them. Therefore, before creating a filter to block someone, especially if the action is deleting the message without reading, make sure that you created the filter inside the correct account in Thunderbird.