Why Doesn’t Blocking Email Senders Work?

⚛️ Most email programs can block email from a specific address. Unfortunately, blocking email from a sender is ineffective when it comes to spam.

Blocking is futile
Trying to stop spam by blocking the sender is futile because spammers now keep changing who the email appears to be from. The better approach is to simply mark spam as spam when it appears in your inbox. If it’s showing up in your spam folder the system is already working properly.

Chapters
0:00 Why Doesn’t Blocking Email Senders Work
0:50 Blocking versus the spam folder
1:55 Misleading email addresses
4:25 Ever-changing email addresses
5:30 Showing up in the spam folder is the right thing
6:07 Is blocking good for anything?

More Ask Leo!

#askleo #spam #email

[jxaby]

Since I started marking "SPAM" as "SPAM", I've been getting MORE SPAM!

[MariaMaria-cgkz]

Thank you so much!! I’m just blocking & blocking then I’d be furious when I see those same blocked emails coming back through.

[midget]

Thank you so much Leo I was smart enough not to open up my scam emails but I was dumb enough to try to block them all so thanks to you and your advice I simply just send them all to my spam and once a week I just delete the whole spam folder. So thank you so much from one of your lifetime subscriber.

[tobeornottobe]

This was a tremendous help Mr. Leo. It hit on every single one of my problems. Thank you so much. And I love the way you don't spend 15 min. setting up what you're going to discuss. You get right to it. Great job. Kudo!

[michellemobakeng]

It's the first time I get to understand why blocking email senders doesn't work and you providing THE answer. Thank you.

My Yahoo Mail asks for an update, I clicked thinking it had been long overdue. The update turns out to be an UPgrade that includes removing ads, Decluttering inbox with domain blocking - would that mean decluttering unwanted email senders? Yahoo knows what they are doing, right? All for £4.99 per month. It's like the viruses in our home and office computers; there weren't any when they first started their commercialisation but suddenly our computers got infested and we had to buy anti-viruses, 'better' computers, etc.

[glasslinger]

My question more is WHY do they send spam over and over. If they are out to get customers, they KNOW after one attempt they have struck out. So why send over and over, only antagonizing the recipient to where they would never buy from them ever!

[triplex]

Thank you - this is the only video that I've found on the net that ever explained this issue to me. Now I understand - getting all the garbage emails to land in my spam folder is the best that you can ever do.

[christaglia]

I saw another video where they said Marking as Spam is bad because it verifies that your email is active and that gets sent back to the spammer so they can sell your email off. Seems like there is no great solution. I wish mail programs would step up their verification game to create an account or something.

[darylhanson]

Would like to block emails based on the number of characters in their randomly created address. The character string is considerably longer than legitimate emails.

[SCMIY]

When you have 5k spam mails and need that one mail which landed in spam by mistake....

[timhaas]

Since you’re correct about all this, Leo. I created a rule to filter and move to spam one annoying email subject line that constantly repeats. Ha! Got ‘em!

[jxaby]

Thanks. That helps. I will now just mark the messages as spam. But this is quite frustrating. There must be a better way.

[steverock]

Totally agree, I’m blocking over 1000 emails per week but just end up getting even more

[XLEGION]

Thank you
thank you thank you. This is the best explanation of how spam filters work that I’ve ever seen.

[MYMAKEUPROOMDIVA]

is there a way to do a bounce back to send the sender a error message in yahoo mail

[tyronewalker]

This is my only frustration with YouTube.

[Wize]

So the better question is WHY DO EMAIL PROVIDERS ALLOW SPOOFING when its DECEPTIVE and ALLOWS SPAM?! 🤔 SPAM could be greatly REDUCED or STOPPED if the email sender service didnt allow spoofing the address and/or the receiver email provider verified the spoofed address matched the sending address (because they have both addresses), if NO MATCH = AUTO-DELETE. That would force all email senders/spammers to reveal the REAL address and the Spam Blocking filters on email would actually work on spammers. SPOOFING would be pointless. End of Spam. In the meantime, everyone needs to report spam email as PHISHING, not just block. A higher level security. I think they take the spam more seriously as these type of spammers are the worst, disguised as legit companies to steal your CC#$$$$!

[ValioMadre]

I wish apple had an automatic function returning all spam mail back to the sender without reaching my inbox would be ideal for me.

[yaird]

You explain very clearly,
Anyway I am trying to set a rule to block emails that have similar marks in all of these emails for example: <> But the rule fails to block anyway, is there a reason for it?
Is it possible to set a rule that will block permanent signs that appear in all these emails?

[charliereed]

OMG! and I've been wasting my time adding rules to the spams on my Mac junk folder