A new way to block unwanted emails

Shortwave gives you a hefty arsenal for deciding who can enter your inbox and when. With a combination of skip inbox, delivery schedules, thread muting, and push notifications, you have options for deciding just how often a contact is allowed to knock on your digital door.

But even so, the occasional junk sender slips through the cracks. Sometimes the best defense against new email isn’t dealing with it once it’s there; it’s telling it to never come back. That’s why Shortwave just introduced a more powerful suite of features to block contacts, screen new senders, and unsubscribe from mailing lists in just one click.

Block unwanted spam

On any given thread in your inbox, you now have a powerful new action available to you: block spam.

Block spam is available on both web and mobile as a one-click way of simultaneously blocking a sender and marking a thread as spam. Blocking a sender automatically trashes all future messages from them, so they can never flood your inbox again.

As for marking a thread as spam, we recommend reserving this for only the junkiest senders. You can leave the “mark as spam” option unchecked if you simply want to block a sender without reporting them as spam to Gmail.

For keyboard users, easily pull up this modal with the shortcut Ctrl b.

Screen new senders

Stay in control of your inbox by filtering first-time senders. Shortwave flags threads that come from new senders, so you can block the junk before it gets out of hand.

You will now see banners at the top of emails from senders you haven’t communicated with before. You can easily block the sender via the banner, automatically trashing all future messages from them.

Unsubscribe from junk mail

Sometimes blocking a sender or marking someone as spam may feel a little too harsh. After all, there are instances where you intentionally provide your email address—only to realize you’d rather not keep getting dozens of updates from Crunchbase that you’re never going to open.

For newsletters, mailing lists, and other senders that you are subscribed to, Shortwave offers a one-click unsubscribe on both web and mobile. We do the heavy-lifting for you, following senders’ instructions to automatically unsubscribe from lists on your behalf. In the cases where we can’t unsubscribe you, we redirect you to a page to unsubscribe yourself in a matter of seconds.

Even better, you can unsubscribe from a mailing list without ever leaving your keyboard using the shortcut Ctrl u.

View and manage blocked senders

Blocked the wrong person? You can double-check who is barred from your inbox and manage blocked statuses via Settings > Inbox. Senders you block are not notified—your decisions remain private so you can filter junk confidently.

With this new set of inbox screeners, Shortwave lets you take easy steps today to have a calmer inbox going forward.