Ignoring a sender

Newsletters, job-board alerts and cold outreach arrive at the same address your real inquiries do. Ignore is how you stop keeping them.

Two widths

On any message:

• Ignore this sender blocks that one address.
• Ignore this whole domain blocks everyone writing from it, subdomains included.

The confirmation names the exact pattern it is about to block, and the toast afterwards repeats it. Read it. Blocking jobs@agency.example and blocking agency.example differ by a lot, and the difference shows up later as mail you never got.

What happens

Two things at once:

1. The message body is deleted. Not hidden, deleted. What that message said is gone.
2. New mail from that pattern is never stored again. It is refused as it arrives rather than stored and cleaned up afterwards, so it never lands in your data at all.

What stays is the envelope: sender, recipients, reply-to address, subject, date, the message identifiers that hold the thread together, and whether there was an attachment. The message shows as a struck-out stub in the thread and under the Ignored filter. That is deliberate: a block you cannot see is one you cannot reason about, and a thread whose middle vanished would read as data loss.

What is destroyed is the content: the encrypted body and the preview text. If the subject line itself is the sensitive part, ignoring is not enough, and you want the conversation deleted.

Older messages you already have from that sender are not touched. Ignoring is about what happens from now on.

Lifting a block

Not from the app yet. The block is recorded and reversible in principle, but the screen that lists what you have blocked and takes an entry back off the list is not built (#1340). Treat an ignore as permanent until it ships, and prefer blocking the single address over the whole domain when you are unsure.

When it does arrive, lifting a block will affect future mail only. Messages skipped while the block was on are not fetched retroactively, because Steerd has already moved past them in your mailbox and does not go back.

Ignoring is not deleting a conversation

An ignored message stays part of its thread, and a thread where somebody once wrote something useful keeps that. If what you want is the whole conversation gone, delete it rather than blocking the person.