We are in a digital age, and this has affected the way we do things and communicate. The majority of people now prefer and uses the internet aided mode of communication over traditional methods.
If you receive messages through emails and communicate using the internet regularly, you may have come across terms such as spam, scam, and phishing. However, whitelist might be a strange term to you. In this article, you will understand what it means, how it works, and its benefit.
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What is Whitelisting?
Whitelist is a term that has to do with the emailing system.
Whitelisting is a process that entails instructing your email provider that you need emails from a particular email address or domain name to be allowed into your inbox rather than it ending up in the spam box.
So it is essential to fully understand the term “Whitelist” for you to prevent the difficulty of having your emails unnecessarily removed or having to search through the spam box for important messages.
Messages from a whitelist email address will always end up in your email inbox. This makes it easy to access the mails and receive notifications as it delivers on your phone or PC. You won’t be able to get notified of emails that don’t enter your direct email box or whenever you are unable to whitelist an email address or domain name.
Irrespective of the email provider you are using, it is essential to understand the process of whitelisting an email address for you to get the desired information in time.
Below are the steps to whitelist an email address or domain name across different email provider platforms.
How to Whitelist on Gmail
If you are using Gmail as an email provider, it is straightforward to whitelist and enable a particular sender mails to get into your main email box and allowed for all potential communications. The process of whitelisting on Gmail can be quickly done via the web mode through the steps below:
- From the top right of the screen above, click the settings icon and click “settings” from the drop-down menu.
- Click the tab tagged “Filtered and Blocked Addresses” to have access to your existing filters information.
- Click the “Create a new filter” tag and type in the domains or emails you like to whitelist.
If you want to whitelist just one email address, enter the full address. But if you’re going to whitelist every email sender from a particular domain, enter the domain name, for example, “@yahoo.com.” This will be seen by the Gmail service to always all every email coming from a yahoo sender into your direct mailbox.
- Click the “Create filter” tag to confirm the filter and then select “Never send to Spam” to enable the emails in the filter to be whitelisted. You can decide to Star the emails, assign a given label, or mark them as crucial.
How to Whitelist on Outlook
On Outlook, Whitelisting a particular email address or domain is easy, and it works by attaching the domain or address to a group referred to as “safe senders.” Any address added to this group (safe senders) will be automatically pushed to your inbox without any regard for spam filters. Below are the steps on how to add a domain or an address to safe senders:
- Click the “Settings” icon, and then click “View all Outlook settings.”
- Click “Junk email,” and then select “Safe mailing lists” or “Safe senders and domains” to choose the email or domain you desire to whitelist.
- Type in the email address or domain name you want to add to the group (Safe senders). Ensure you orderly include the “@” character for domain names to whitelist emails with the exact string of characters you typed in (and nothing more).
You can also attach an email address that has sent you an email on Outlook. Even though they produce the same result, this method is more efficient and quicker than the manual process of typing in information.
How to Whitelist on Yahoo Mail
If you desire to move a domain name or an address to your Yahoo Mail whitelist, the process of doing such here is much easier than it is on other email service providers analyzed above.
For as long as you’ve received at least an email from the address or domain name in question, all you will do is mark the message as Not Spam by highlighting it in the Bulk folder.
Once you’ve singled out an email from a sender, it (Yahoo Mail spam filters) will automatically enable messages from that address into the inbox.
Also, if the address or domain name you are trying to whitelist hasn’t sent you an email before, you will necessarily need to follow the steps below for the address to be whitelisted:
- Click the “Settings” icon, and then from the Yahoo Mail menu, click “More Settings.”
- Click the “Filters” button and then click “Add” to type in the information about the sender address or domain name.
- You can then enter any series of text you wish to whitelist in future emails. It could be a domain name or an email address to anything you want to be in the message’s body.
Yahoo Mail makes it very easy to whitelist email sender or domain name once they have already sent you an email in your Bulk folder. To make the process of whitelisting easy, ask the person you are attempting to whitelist to send you an email in advance.
How to Whitelist in Hotmail
Hotmail marks any email that it sees as SPAM in the Junk folder, which is on the left side after logging in. There is a need always to check the Junk folder to ensure that any email you are expecting doesn’t end up there. To whitelist a domain name or address on Hotmail, you have to include spread@reasonables.com to the Hotmail safe list.
Below are the steps to follow:
- Sign in to your Hotmail account.
- If there is an email in your junk folder, open it, and click the “Not Junk” icon.
- Click the “option” button” located in the upper right corner.
- Click the “More options” button displayed from the drop-down menu.
- Click the “Safe and blocked senders” link located on the “mail” tab.
- Click the “Safe senders” link.
- Enter spread@reasonables.com inside the dialog box tagged “Sender or domain to mark as safe.”
- Click the “Add to list” button, and you will see it in the “Safe senders and domains” list.
You can continue repeating this step to keep adding more domain names or email addresses into the safe sender list.
Conclusion
The most accepted way of whitelisting an email address is adding it to the safe list or white list in the email application. Though there is not a precise standard technique, and it might vary from application to application. If such an option does not exist on your application, contact your email support team, they will undoubtedly assist you with it