Frequently Asked Questions

There are a few reasons why an email might not get blocked from your email account. Here are a few of the main reasons:

• Block Sender takes a few seconds to block an email message from the time it was received in your Gmail account. So if you’re looking at your inbox as you receive an email that should be blocked, wait a few seconds and then it will either go away by itself or you can force Gmail to refresh your inbox and it should then go away.
• Your block doesn’t actually match the email. Blocked addresses, subjects, and phrases can commonly be mis-spelled, which leads to spam emails getting through to your account. A blocked sender may also have multiple accounts they email you with, so make sure to block all known email addresses for people you want to block from your inbox.
• Your account has been disabled, which may be due to needing re-authorization (see below), your plan expiring, or you may have paused blocking on your account.
• Your Gmail account needs to be re-authorized. Your Gmail account may become un-linked from Block Sender for a few different reasons (most commonly due to changing passwords on your Google account), which means we can’t block emails. If you suspect this is the case, log in to the dashboard and check if your account needs to be re-authorized. You should also receive an email from our system telling you to do so.
• Some email addresses can’t be blocked. This is done for your own protection so you don’t miss things like Password Reset emails or security emails from important email addresses. If you want to know if a particular email address or domain is un-blockable, feel free to reach out to us.

If you don’t think any of these reasons apply to your specific case, feel free to reach out to our support team at [email protected] and we’ll look in to it further.

From time to time you may notice that a fake bounce-back is not sent for a particular email message. Here are the primary reasons why an email message may not be able to be bounced back:

• The email message has already been bounced back once
• Your Block Sender account has not been upgraded, or it has been downgraded due to failed payments, refunded payments, end of subscription, etc.
• The sender’s inbox known to not be monitored, and therefore your bounce will not be able to be delivered, so it is not sent
• The sender’s account is known to send automated responses, which would cause an endless cycle of bounce-backs
• Your Gmail account has reached its daily send limit

If you don’t think any of these reasons apply to your specific situation, feel free to contact us to look in to it further.

In order to send a bounce-back, you must have a registered mailbox that is able to send emails and not just receive them. So therefore, this cannot just be a forwarding address that isn’t able to send emails.

If your address is connected to another Gmail account (like a Gmail alias account), then you must link it as a Block Sender Alias account in order to have the bounce-backs sent. To do this, follow the these instructions.

If you submit a payment through PayPal and your account isn’t automatically upgraded within an hour, there may be an issue to address. One common problem is when your PayPal email address is different than your registered Block Sender address, which may prevent your account from being automatically upgraded. If you think that this is the issue, please send an email to [email protected] requesting that the license be transferred to the correct Block Sender account.

In order to verify your identity and ensure that you do own the PayPal account, either submit the request via the same email as your PayPal email address or send the PayPal transaction ID along with your request. Please also indicate which Block Sender account your payment should be applied to.

 

The easiest way to check if you have a license is to follow the instructions below:

1. Click over to https://app.blocksender.io and log in with your registered e-mail address, if prompted.
2. Check the upper right-hand corner of the Dashboard window.
3. If it says “Upgrade Now” then you are currently on free plan, but if it says “Plus” or “Pro” then you are on a paid plan and have a license.

If you block a sender after they have already emailed you, then a bounce-back will not be sent for the previous email you already received. The bounce-backs will only be sent for future emails you receive from the blocked sender.

However, if you’d still like to have a bounce-back sent for the initial email received, follow these instructions.

• Make sure your account has been upgraded to either Plus or Pro status.
• Go to your Gmail inbox and open the email you want to bounce back to the sender.
• Click the “Block” button and then select “Reply with…”:

• Make sure that “Fake Bounce-Back” is selected in the drop-down menu.

 

• Click “Send response”

Note: If a bounce-back has already been sent for this email then “Reply with…” will instead say “✓ Bounce-back sent” and you will not be able to send another bounce-back.

There could be a few possible reasons for Block Sender not showing up in your Gmail inbox.

Chrome

• The Block Sender extension may have been updated and its permissions need to be re-approved in Chrome. This is indicated by a yellow exclamation mark in the upper right-hand corner of Chrome:
  
• The Block Sender browser extension may have been uninstalled, or may have been temporarily disabled:
  

• Block Sender may not be compatible with your version of Chrome. This extension requires at least Chrome version 54 or higher:
  • You can confirm that you are running the latest version of Chrome by typing in chrome://version in your address bar.
  • Alternatively, you may click this icon ≡ (in the upper right-hand corner of your browser) and then click Help -> About Google Chrome.

•  Lastly, your employer may have disabled the use of extensions in your web browser for security reasons. You can verify by checking with your company’s IT department.

When Block Sender is installed and activated successfully you should see this red stop sign icon in your Gmail inbox:

Yes, of course! Our user’s privacy and security is our top priority.

• We use Stripe to handle credit/debit card transactions, which securely stores your payment information and processes payments. Stripe is trusted by hundreds of thousands of other businesses like Facebook, Pinterest, Target, Lyft, and more.
• We also accept PayPal, which securely stores your payment information and handles transactions between your PayPal account and our PayPal account.

Both Stripe and PayPal are PCI certified, which ensures that they provide a very high level of protection and privacy for your account information.

If you ever have any questions about payments or security, feel free to reach out to us at [email protected].

Many email providers attach both the sender’s name and email address information to each sent email, which may look like this: “Billy Bob <[email protected]>”. If the sender you want to block uses the same name across multiple email addresses, then it may be easier to just block their actual name instead of creating a new block for each of their individual email addresses.

However, the “name field” of an email address is optional, so this isn’t always a guaranteed way to block a person. Blocking by email address is more reliable, in that case. We’d recommend using this method along with other types of blocks to cover as many ways to block a sender as possible.

When creating a block, you may choose between blocking emails from an entire website (like “spam.com”) or an entire domain extension (aka a Top Level Domain, or TLD), like “.xxx” or “.org”.

Every website must have a domain extension, such as: “.org”, “.com”, or “.net”. Some of these domain extensions were created for specific purposes or niches (like “.xxx” being mostly for sexually explicit material), which may allow you to block large amounts of unwanted emails just by blocking a TLD. Blocking by domain extension is also useful for blocking emails from an entire country.

For example “.cn” is used by most Chinese websites, and thus if you don’t want to receive any emails from a Chinese-based website you should block the “.cn” TLD.

Note: If you choose to block a popular domain extension like “.com”, you will NOT receive emails from any site that ends in “.com”, such as Google.com, Facebook.com, Ebay.com, etc., so please be careful when creating these kinds of blocks.

Block Sender offers a few different plans depending on your needs:

Free

Free accounts are given the following features:

• 1 linked Gmail account
• 25 blocked addresses
• Unlimited blocked emails

Plus

Plus accounts, which is the second of the three tiers, have the following features:

• 1 linked Gmail account
• 500 blocked addresses
• Unlimited blocked emails
• Fake bounce-backs

This tier is available for $5/month. Or, at an %18 discount, you can pay $49 for an annual subscription.

Pro

Pro account status is the highest available tier, and includes the following:

• 3 linked Gmail account
• 1000 blocked addresses
• Unlimited blocked emails
• Fake bounce-backs

This tier is available for $9/month. Or, at an %18 discount, you can pay $89 for an annual subscription.

If you need to link more accounts, or if you run out of blocks, you can always add an Account add-on ($3/month, or $29/year) to link another Gmail account or a Blocks add-on ($3/month, or $29/year) for 1000 extra blocked addresses.

For a more up-to-date list of features and pricing, see the Pricing section on our main page.