How to block emails by subject or keyword

Some junk is easier to recognise by what it says than by who sent it. If the same message keeps arriving from a different address every time, blocking senders one at a time is a losing battle.

You can block it by the words in the subject line instead, using a filter on your Custom Blocklist.

When this is the right tool

A subject filter is a good fit when:

The subject line is always the same, or nearly the same
The sender address changes with every email
You can't block the domain, because it's a Gmail or Outlook address and you get real mail from those too

If the sender address stays the same, you don't need a filter. Just add the address or the domain to your Custom Blocklist.

Add a subject filter

Go to your Custom Blocklist.
Click Add filter.
Set the field to Subject.
Set the type to Contains.
Enter the word or phrase you want to block, for example Apply for Loans & Business Financing.
Click Add and close.

That's it. From now on, any email arriving with that phrase in the subject gets blocked.

Narrowing it down

Click Show advanced options on the filter and you can be more precise:

Email account - apply the filter to one of your connected accounts instead of all of them
Recipient email - apply it only to mail sent to one of your aliases
Sender email - apply it only to particular senders, on top of the rest of the filter

Leave these alone and the filter applies to all your accounts and all senders.

What happens to the emails we block

Nothing is ever deleted.

Your Custom Blocklist is the first check we run, before our own spam check, so your own rules always win. Blocked emails are moved out of your inbox into your blocked folder, which is _lma-shield/spam unless you've changed it, and they appear on the Spam Blocker page with a blocklisted label. There's more on this in How does the Spam Blocker work?.

If you use the Screener, blocklisted senders are screened out of your inbox as well. You'll find them in your Screened Mail view by filtering by "blocked", and they won't be included in your Screener Digest.

If your filter catches something you wanted

It happens, and it's quick to fix.

On the Spam Blocker page, click the blocklisted label next to the email and choose Move back to inbox. Moving the email back yourself in your email client works too, we watch for that.
Go back to your Custom Blocklist and make the filter more specific, or delete it.

Still not behaving the way you expect? Get in touch and tell us the phrase you filtered on and a couple of examples, and we'll take a look with you.