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How to 'ignore' emails in Outlook

7 October 2022

Occasionally you’ll get someone who sends lots of messages you don’t want to see. Outlook has a few options for refusing or politely ignoring messages from certain email senders – either individually or automatically.

Most commonly these are enthusiastic zealots on some subject and are trying to ‘spread the word’ on their pet subject. They are sending emails to everyone in their address book, probably with the best of intentions. These aren’t standard spam messages, yet often you don’t want to ask the person to stop for fear of offending them.

The solution is to keep receiving the emails but tell Outlook to ignore them in some way.

Junk Email

A fast solution is to use the Junk Email filter. The senders email address can be blocked which means any messages from that address go directly to the Junk E-Mail folder.

Putting it into the Junk E-Mail folder means you don’t see it but gives you the choice to recover the message if necessary.

However this will apply to all messages from that email address, which might be too much if the person sends other messages you want to read.

To block a sender, right-click on a message, choose Junk then Block Sender.

Outlook - Junk E-mail - Block Sender.jpg image from How to — Junk menu in earlier versions of Outlook

(As you can see, thought the look of the menu has changed, the Junk options in Outlook haven’t changed for many years.)

That message and all future messages will go to the Junk E-Mail folder.

Quick Steps

A non-automated option is Quick Steps, this lets you combine multiple actions (from a limited range) into a single click action.

At Home | Quick Steps, make a new Quick Step which moves a selected message to another folder (it can be “Junk” or some other folder) and marks the message as Read.

Rule to delete

A more refined and automatic alternative is Outlook Rules. With rules you can target not just a particular sender but also other characteristics. This is useful if you want to filter only some messages from a person.

For example you might want to ignore messages with words like ‘UFO’ ‘Aliens’ ‘Moon’ ‘Hoax’ etc in either the subject or message body.

Go to Home | Rules | Manage Rules and Alerts dialog and create a new rule for incoming email.

In the conditions:

From People or Public group = the email address or contact of the sender
With specific words in the subject or body = one or more keywords.

Outlook - Rule example for excluding some messages from a person.jpg image from How to

This example would trap messages from [email protected] that mention his fixations on Gumboots or Sheep.

Outlook also has some useful conditions to identify messages that are or are not specifically sent to you eg:

Sent only to me
Where my name is in the To box

… further down the conditions list ….

Where my name is in the Cc box
Where my name is in the To or Cc box
Where my name is NOT in the To box (we’ve capitalized the NOT since it’s easy to miss in Outlook)

On the next page of the wizard you set the actions to take.

Outlook - Rule action for excluding some messages from a person.jpg image from How to

We suggest moving to either the Junk E-mail or Deleted Items folders.

Auto-Reply

It’s not a good idea to setup an auto-reply (Rule action: ‘Reply using a specific template’) to each unwanted message – this just adds message traffic and probably won’t do any good. Better to indicate in your last message to the person that you won’t read future messages which will be deleted automatically.

Hit Delete

Of course, the other option is to simply hit the delete key!