10 Replies

Thank you for the clarification! I understand what's happening now and from my testing, it does look to be buggy for me too. I found that while you can still ADD blocked senders to the modified filter (by right clicking on the message), they aren't removed when you click Unblock. 

Aha! I think I've figured it out...

 

So it looks like the bug in this case may actually be the ability to edit that filter. Since it's one internally-created by SmarterMail and linked to the "Block/Unblock" command, I can see why it would not be restricted from modification. 

 

If you click on an email address in the message header and block the sender here, it gets added to the Internal Blocked Senders list. If you block a user this way though, the filter conditions and actions cannot be adjusted - only the email address list of blocked users can be changed. However, when you right-click on an email address and choose Block Sender here, you CAN modify the filter's actions (Caveat: you can only edit this filter from the right-click shortcut if you blocked your very first user this way. If a Internal Blocked Senders filter is already there from using the message header shortcut, it'll be added to that unchangeable filter.) 

 

In short, it looks like the two links to block a user from an email (right click shortcut and header shortcut) are using two different functions when they should share the same functionality. If you delete all Internal Blocked Senders filters (copy the email addresses first) and block a user from the message header instead, you'll see how this option should be functioning. 

How about just removing the block/unblock sender from the menu completely? This 'feature' might have been useful at one time but is now out-of-date (spammers never re-use addresses) and it causes endless confusion for users:

 

 

Blocking a sender does no good as messages are gone forever (sender doesn't get a bounce, message doesn't go to trash). Choices should be 1) unsubscribe, 2) mark as spam, or 3) manually create a filter to move these messages into Trash (requires a user who knows what he/she is doing which is good).

Here's a friendly request to see if Block Sender could be fixed up for the next minor. The way it works today is way too complicated (just read the above thread). Here are some simple changes that would probably take less then an hour.

 

1) It shouldn't delete messages, just move them to spam (or block outright in SMTP?).

 

2) Give the user a friendly dialog box that tells what's going to happen (see how Gmail does it in this thread).

 

3) Is 'Unblock Sender' really needed? They way the system currently works, you will never see another message from the person, so why have Unblock?

 

Thanks,

Kevin