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Catalina Quick Tip: How to Block, Mute and Unsubscribe from Email

The Mail app in macOS Catalina has been updated to allow you to easily block and unsubscribe to emails. It can block all email from specified senders and move their messages directly to the trash. 

When you block mail from a specific sender, those emails will be automatically moved into the trash. I’ve found this to be a great time-saver in my never-ending battle with phishing and spam.

Just click the sender’s name in any email header and then click Block. Boom! They’re blocked

Screenshot of "Block Contact" menu item in macOS Catalina

Apple has built a new unsubscribe button in Mail that will appear above the email header from commercial list senders. Clicking the new link will send a request to have your email address unsubscribed from the list. This means you’ll no longer have to search through an email to find the “unsubscribe” link. Whoo hoo!

Screenshot of "Unsubscribe" button in macOS Catalina

macOS Catalina Mail also lets you “mute” an email thread that’s gotten out of hand.  This allows you to mute that email thread, which will stop any future incoming notifications from chiming your device.

Screenshot of "Mute" menu item in macOS Catalina

Click on an email in your inbox. Then go to the Mail menu bar and select Message. You’ll see various options, including “Mute.”

Update: All the features I described in this article worked in at least one beta I used, but the feature in question seems to have disappeared in the final version of Catalina. Apple’s tech support has offered no good solution/answer so far.

Dennis Sellers
the authorDennis Sellers
Contributing Author
Dennis has over 40 years of journalism experience and has written hundreds of articles. For the past 20-plus years, he's been an online journalist, covering mainly Apple Inc. He's written for MacCentral, MacWorld, MacMinute, Macsimum News, Apple Daily Report, and is now contributing editor at Apple World Today.
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21 Comments

  • Hi Dave,

    You’re a little late to this party (2.5 years), but this feature still doesn’t work. You’re right to complain and hope you read the entire thread here from 2019.

    This much-needed feature has NEVER worked. Never. And it still hangs there in a pulldown menu looking promising, a cruel taunt. Typical of Apple’s corporate playbook, it remains another disappointing and unacknowledged bug.

    As you’ll note from the thread below, I had a level 2 tech from Apple just walk away and abandon my query as to why no part of this feature worked or when it might.

    Sadly, it’s something that Apple can’t seem to control on its own domains (mac, me, or icloud) either. Doesn’t matter how many times in the past 6 months I’ve submitted (as attachments) the exact same spammed fake email from “Costco” to Abuse at iCloud dot com and ReportPhishing at apple dot com. The same email returns to greet me every day, if not more frequently.

    And then there’s the massive text spam our apple email addresses get hit with. I get more at my Apple ID email (a mac dot com address) than I do on my iPhone number. Again, forwarding these as instructed to iMessage.spam at apple dot com has no effect.

    I’m all for Apple being a true privacy advocate and slapping down FaceBook and Google for the theft of our data, but it’s time for Apple to focus some of that righteous energy on SPAM. They have billions they could throw at it and still have billions left for massive stock buybacks and a stingy dividend.

    Apple could be the spam-fighting superhero of the world if it wanted to garner some excellent PR.

    In the meantime, keep calling Apple and complaining about features that don’t work. Keep posting about them on Apple’s boards. In theory, if a larger percentage of users used the spam reporting e-mail addresses I posted above, perhaps Apple would get the message there too. Or perhaps their Bayesian AI would…

    Keep up the good fight.

  • Since I got my new M1 24″ iMac last week I’ve been blocking the daylights out of spam/scam/uninvited emails… but nothing happens. These same senders are there again the very next day. ‍♂️

  • I love being able to Block a sender on Catalina and get the red hand, but on Big Sur that is still an option, but no red hand icon to let you know you can just dump all red hands without opening each mail up to be sure it is already blocked.

    Thanks

  • the block function as YOU know doe’s not work.
    nor doe’s the option to mute not working.
    i spend all my time trying to get rid of all this garbage.
    i must get 500 a day anymore.
    FIX THE E-MAIL SYSTEM PLEASE.

  • It worked in at least one beta I used, but the feature seemed to have disappeared in the final version of Catalina. Apple’s tech support has offered no good solution/answer so far.

  • I blocked an e-mail sender (Levi’s) and received another e-mail from them with the red “blocked” symbol. Right-clicking resulted in an option to “unblock” the sender!

    • My UNANSWERED question remains: “Is ANYONE using this new feature successfully?”

      Apple Level 2 tech “Ray” completely abandoned me after saying he would get back to me after “a couple days,” two weeks ago…, but I’ve yet to hear of even one person who is using this feature with success.

      Is ANYONE using this new feature successfully?

      And if the bitter irony of it never working is that it “might” be actually sending LEGIT email that I’ve not tagged in any way, to the trash. If this feature ever works, I hope Apple will allow us to edit the addresses in the blocked file as I’d prefer to block and trash an entire domain.

      I’ve posted a detailed query on Apple’s Community Boards which seem to be filled to the brim with responders who appear to be more concerned with upping their ratings whist providing no help whatsoever. This is probably the 3rd time in a year I’ve posted about a software issue where no one, of any caliber, has responded with a solution. The fact that they’re posting so much often makes it look as if the problem has been solved, and so no one else posts. What the heck happened to those boards? Is it just me, or has the quality of expertise there experienced a serious drop?

      Is ANYONE using this new feature successfully?

      Help?…

    • You also have an option to “apply rule”. Click on it ant the blocked message will go to the bin. Is annoying that one needs to do this every time the mail pops up.

      • For whatever reasons, this is a feature that never appeared at all, much less “as advertised.”

        This in spite of probably thousands, if not tens of thousands, who reported it to Apple, and even those who worked directly with AppleCare to see if it was something they could fix, the feature never worked. There never was an automatic script built-in that moved “blocked” contacts to the trash.

        For whatever reasons, this is a feature that never appeared at all, much less “as advertised.”

        This in spite of probably thousands who reported it to Apple, and even those who worked directly with AppleCare (like me) to see if it was something they could fix, the feature never worked.

        There never was an automatic script built-in that moved “blocked” contacts to the trash.

        In truth, it was not ever really going to be a contact “block,” because that could easily be done at the domain level. For me, it’s all about my Mac.com email addresses that I made primary and now can’t really control spam in because Apple won’t block obvious email addresses I submit to Abuse@iCloud.com every day.

        For domains I own, it only takes about a minute to do this and then that Keto spammer can never hit my email box at all. It’s just rejected and bounced back, not simply flagged with a little red hand and placed in your junk mail folder. Junk mail filters do this well enough as it is. The problem is that they’re only going to be about 90-95% accurate. That may sound great until you realize that getting 20-30 pieces of spam a day means you’re going to have to look in the folder every day to confirm it’s really spam. Especially because if you miss one good piece of email from your bank, and you simply erase the spam folder without looking, the Bayesian filters will start to do that with ALL future emails from your bank.

        I’m just disappointed in Apple as regards their obvious ambivalence, if not outright disinterest, in the management of their own email domains.

  • That’s great – new features. But how do we restore usable functions like Column views and accurate (mail) searches?

  • Let me check into this further. As best I can tell, it’s working on macOS Catalina Mail on my iMac just fine — as it was with the last few beta versions. But perhaps sometime went awry between the last beta and the first official version.

    • Yeah, I can’t seem to get it to move anything to the Trash, which is the whole point. If yours is working, I’d love to see the exact settings that have made it work.

      I get horrible SPAM from only 3 or 4 sources, all conspiracy-laden, crazy far-Right stuff that I’m assuming someone who didn’t like my political views signed me up for. I’ve phoned and written to Apple about it for a few years now to no avail. This feature would remove 95% of that pain IF it would WORK!

      Love to know if it’s working for you.

      Thanks!

  • Has sorting been improved in Catalina Mail? Current sorting only sorts messages. Mailboxes must be sorted manually by dragging a new mailbox to where you want it. It would be very helpful if mailboxes could be sorted from the “on my mac” or individual mailbox/sub mailbox level by right clicking on the level you want to sort from and then choosing the sort criteria from a menu. Same comment applies to sorting Safari bookmarks.

  • Well, I was initially thrilled to read this here. But it’s still not moving things to Trash. The only thing that has changed is that the messages in the Junk mailbox now have red hands on them.

    Any thoughts on that?

    If it doesn’t move the message to the trash, it’s of no use.

    I cannot see any other configurations to tick and “Move it to the Trash” is definitely selected for this major spammer I cannot get rid of called TheDailyGrind.

    Suggestions appreciated.

    • Has anyone gotten this new feature to work?

      I’m surprised Dennis Sellers has not responded.

      It seriously does not automatically move anything to the trash on my system.

      Dennis?

      • Apple still says that when you block mail from a specific sender, those emails will be automatically moved into the trash. Apple also notes that you can edit this quickly enough by clicking on the mail sender’s name in any email header (similar to how it works in Messages).

        However, the feature, which worked okay in a beta version of macOS Catalina, does seem to be undependable in the “finished” version. Sometimes it works for me as intended; sometimes it doesn’t. I’ll see if I can get an answer from Apple and share it.

        • Thanks, Dennis. I fully understand the function and how it is supposed to work. It’s not complicated, it just has NEVER worked, even for one email, EVER.

          The Level 2 tech I spoke to Monday didn’t even know about the new feature, and was completely useless in trying to figure any solutions out, but said he would call back in a couple days, which he has not.

          If you’re witnessing any “undependable” actions in the finished, non-Beta version, I woudl think Apple would know about it, but maybe they’ve gone silent as per their wont. All too often they will not admit there is a problem until they have a reliable fix for it. The latest update to Catalina yesterday, was NOT that fix, sadly…

          I would deeply appreciate anything you can learn from Apple about this as my efforts have not produced anything as of yet. I dropped Larry a line and asked if you’d email me directly if you prefer not to blog about it, but either way, I’d really like to know if this feature will ever automatically work.

          Very much obliged,

          Mick

          • It worked in at least one beta I used, but the feature seemed to have disappeared in the final version of Catalina. Apple’s tech support has offered no good solution/answer so far.

          • This is perturbing. The feature worked in at least one beta I used, but the feature seemed to have disappeared in the final version of Catalina. Apple’s tech support has offered no good solution/answer so far.