Gmail's Block button doesn't do what you think it does

A company I was once a customer of went through a marketing-list rebuild last month, and their new system seems to have lost the sliver of memory that said “this person unsubscribed in 2023”. The emails started arriving twice a week. I unsubscribed again. The emails kept arriving. I clicked Gmail’s Block button on a particularly aggressive one. The emails kept arriving.

The trouble is the Block button does almost nothing useful. Most of the guides will tell you to click it, and the next time a message turns up they will tell you to click it again, as though enough repetition will eventually take. It does not. There is a different button, in a different menu, that does the job properly, and once I had set up two or three of them I stopped seeing the senders I had been trying to escape for years.

What Block actually does

If you click the three-dot menu on a Gmail message and pick “Block ”, Gmail does this:

1. Adds the sender’s exact email address to a quiet allowlist of blocked addresses
2. Routes future mail from that exact address to your Spam folder
3. Leaves it in Spam for 30 days
4. Eventually deletes it

That looks fine on paper. In practice three things break it:

• A marketing system rarely sends from one address. Today it is newsletters@company.com. Next month it is news@company.com or noreply@company-mail.com. Block catches one and misses the next.
• Spam still costs you storage. Gmail’s free plan gives you 15 GB across Gmail, Drive, and Photos. Spam counts against that 15 GB until the 30-day timer empties it. A persistent sender quietly chews through your quota.
• You still see them when you check Spam. The whole point of blocking was to stop being aware of them.

Block is a soft hint to Gmail’s spam classifier, dressed up as a verb. If you want them gone, you want a Filter.

The Filter approach

A Filter is a rule Gmail evaluates against every incoming message before that message reaches your inbox. The rule can match on sender, subject, content, attachment presence, size, and several other fields. If a match is found, Gmail can apply a label, archive, mark as read, forward, star, or delete the message before you ever see it.

Here is the exact recipe for sending an entire company straight to Trash on arrival:

1. Open Gmail in a desktop browser. Click the gear icon, then “See all settings”.
2. Open the “Filters and Blocked Addresses” tab. Click “Create a new filter”.
3. In the “From” field, type @company.com. The leading @ is what makes this a domain match instead of an exact-address match.
4. Click “Create filter”.
5. Tick “Delete it”.
6. Tick “Also apply filter to N matching conversations” if the historical mail is still sitting in your inbox.
7. Click “Create filter”.

Gmail will quietly route every future message from that domain to Trash, then auto-empty Trash after 30 days. You will not see it in Inbox, not in Spam, not in All Mail unless you specifically look for it. The message simply ceases to exist for you.

The part most guides leave out

There are five things worth knowing that the usual write-ups do not mention.

Filter, Block, and Report Spam all do different things

Three buttons, three behaviours, and most people use them interchangeably:

Action	Where the mail goes	What Gmail learns
Block sender	Spam folder for 30 days, then deleted	Nothing global; just your inbox
Report spam	Spam folder for 30 days, then deleted	Gmail’s spam classifier improves slightly for everyone
Filter, Delete it	Trash for 30 days, then deleted	Nothing global; just your inbox

If you genuinely think the sender is sending unwanted mail to other people too, “Report spam” is the prosocial choice. It teaches Gmail to recognise the pattern for the next person. If you just want them out of your own inbox, “Filter, Delete it” is the cleanest. Block sits in an awkward middle ground where it does the work of neither.

Domain filters can catch innocents

The Reddit guides flag this in passing. The detail worth understanding: if the company sends through a shared marketing platform, the From domain is the platform’s, not theirs. @mailchimp.com, @sendgrid.net, @mailgun.org, @sparkpostmail.com, @amazonses.com, and a handful of others handle mail for thousands of companies. Filtering on the platform domain takes out everyone you have ever signed up to a newsletter from.

The fix is to filter on something more specific:

• Their company name in “Has the words”, in quotes, exactly as they spell it in the email body. This catches the marketing platform’s emails that mention them, and only those.
• Their unsubscribe URL domain, dropped into “Has the words” as "unsubscribe.theircompany.com". Most reputable senders include a stable unsubscribe domain in the footer.
• A unique subject pattern, such as the literal start of every weekly newsletter (“Weekly digest”, “Your weekly update from”).

Combine any of these with the platform domain in the From field, and you have a filter that catches the right sender and only the right sender.

Two different unsubscribe buttons exist

Gmail shows two unsubscribe affordances and they behave differently.

The first is the Unsubscribe link inside the email body, in the footer where the sender chose to put it. For shady senders, clicking this confirms to a real human or script that your address is being read by someone. The address may end up sold to other lists. For reputable senders this is fine, because they are legally obliged to honour it under the Spam Act 2003 in Australia and CAN-SPAM in the United States.

The second is the Unsubscribe link Gmail injects beside the sender’s name, near the top of the email. Gmail only shows this when the sender includes a proper List-Unsubscribe header in the message, which most legitimate marketing platforms do. Clicking it triggers an HTTP request directly to the sender’s unsubscribe endpoint without any tracking pixel firing, and is the safer of the two for borderline senders.

Rule of thumb: if Gmail shows the header-based unsubscribe at the top, use that. If only the footer link exists, the sender either does not implement the proper header, or they are not someone you want to confirm your address to. Filter them instead.

Mobile cannot create filters

The Gmail apps on iOS and Android do not expose the filter UI at all. You have to:

• Log into Gmail on a desktop browser
• Or open Gmail on your phone’s browser and pick “Request desktop site” from the menu

Either way, once the filter exists on the account, it applies to every device automatically.

Workspace admins have a different lever

If you are the Workspace admin for a small team and a vendor is harassing your whole organisation, you do not have to ask twelve people to each set up the same personal filter. In the Admin console:

Apps > Google Workspace > Gmail > Spam, phishing, and malware > Blocked senders

You can enter whole domains, with optional applied-to organisational units. The block runs at the message-gateway layer before Gmail ever assigns a message to a particular inbox, which means it is genuinely cheaper than per-user filters. The trade-off is that it applies to everyone, including people in your organisation who may actually want the sender’s mail. For that reason, I usually keep org-level blocks reserved for confirmed abusive senders rather than just persistent ones.

The Forms angle

There is a parallel use of the same trick that has nothing to do with unwanted senders. If you run a Google Form that emails you when someone submits, and the form is set up to send notifications using the form-owner’s address, those notifications can occasionally end up in Spam during Gmail’s first-time learning phase. The fix is the same idea in reverse: build a filter that matches from:me subject:"New response" and forces it to “Never send to Spam, Always mark as important”. You will never miss a submission again.

For anything more sophisticated than the built-in Forms notification (different recipients per response, custom templates, conditional routing), I use FormChime on my own forms. The same filter-as-truth-layer idea applies: pin the notifications, and unwanted senders go to Trash without ever crossing your eye line.

What the inbox looks like after

I have eleven filters of this sort running on my personal Gmail right now. The newest one is for the company I mentioned at the start of this article. The oldest is from 2019, for a recruiter who started emailing me with leads for jobs I had explicitly declined three times. Both senders are technically still sending. Their mail evaporates into Trash within minutes of arrival, no notification, no Spam-folder badge, no count in my unread tally.

Block was never going to do this. The Block button is for the moments when you want Google’s classifier to nudge slightly. The Filter is for the moments when you want a particular sender to stop existing. Two buttons, two jobs, and the one with the more useful job is hidden behind a settings panel three menus deep, which is presumably why most people never find it.