A few months ago, my G Suite-enabled Gmail account reached a grim milestone: with no warning, the “block [email address]” feature—available from the menu with the three vertical dots in the upper left of the Gmail screen—stopped working because I had maxed out the total number of addresses Google allows to be blocked.

For years, I’ve used the feature liberally to block emails from PR ​​people who send off-topic pitches or scammers who try to phish my passwords or infect my devices.

At some point, the block address feature stopped working.

When I use the feature now to block an address, I see a message telling me that all future emails from the address will go to my spam folder.

And when I open the email, sure enough, it’s clear the address is NOT blocked.

I asked Google PR about this and got a response that Gmail accounts are limited to just 1,000 blocked addresses.

And yet, despite all this ingenuity, Gmail limits blocked addresses to a paltry 1,000.

The idea is to copy all 1,000 email addresses I have blocked and paste them into a filter rule that deletes all messages from those senders.

To find the blocklist, click the three vertical dots in the main Gmail window, choose “manage inbox settings,” and select the “filters and blocked addresses'' tab.

The console then returns a list of all the email addresses in the blocklist, with each one separated by a boolean OR.

Then copy the list, go back to the Gmail “filters and blocked addresses” tab, and click “create new filter.” Paste the addresses into the “From” field, click “continue,” tick the “Delete it” box, and click the “create filter” at the bottom.

In theory, this single rule should block all emails sent from these addresses, and that should allow me to delete the 1,000 blocked addresses so I can once again add fresh addresses to the blocklist.