---
title: "Block a sender or a domain"
description: "One address, or everything from a domain, stopped before it reaches you."
url: "https://openemail.uk/docs/knowledge/filters/block-sender"
area: "Knowledge base"
category: "Filters & blocking"
status: "live"
---

# Block a sender or a domain

One address, or everything from a domain, stopped before it reaches you.

## Details

- Blocked from wherever the sender is in front of you: the ⋯ menu on a message, any address in its Details table, or the person’s row in Contacts. Both the address and its domain are offered, because one recruiter is a person and a recruitment firm is a domain.
- Rules take patterns, not just addresses: * for any run of characters and ? for one. noreply@* catches noreply at every domain, news-*@shop.com catches every dated newsletter, *.example.com catches every subdomain. A rule that would match almost everything is refused rather than accepted.
- Paste a whole list at once (commas, spaces and new lines all separate) instead of typing domains in one at a time.
- A sender already caught is shown as blocked wherever they appear, with the rule that caught them, and one click removes it. The rule is named rather than the address because with patterns they are not the same thing: unblocking news-2026@shop.com would remove nothing while appearing to work.
- Contacts has a Blocked filter, so “why have I not heard from them” is answerable in the place you would go to ask it.
- Refused at SMTP time rather than filed, so Spam does not fill up with things you already said no to and the sender is told the message did not arrive. The bounce does not say which rule stopped it.
- One exception, and it is deliberate: when only the author matches and the message arrived through a mailing list, it is filed under Spam instead of refused. A rejection there is answered by the list, not the author, and a list reads it as a bouncing subscriber. Blocking one person is not a request to be unsubscribed.
- A plus-tag does not get around it: blocking news@shop.com blocks news+anything@shop.com. A blocked domain covers its subdomains.
- Mail already delivered stays where it is. Blocking decides what arrives next, and deleting what you already have is a separate decision you make yourself.
- It applies to every address on your own domains, which is every address there is, so blocking is never offered somewhere it would quietly do nothing.