How To Add Contacts To Your Email Whitelist

Nearly everyone these days will experience the annoyance of receiving unwanted spam emails. Many companies have turned to programs that provide a service to block the unwanted mail however, these programs will often also block emails that you wish to receive. In order to receive these emails you will need to add the email addresses to your email white list.

What is an email whitelist?

An email whitelist is a list that you tell a program to accept mail from. These can either be email addresses or domain names.

The Importance of Email Whitelisting

Advertising material that is unwanted or unsolicited, otherwise known as spam can block our email systems and has become a huge problem. A blocking or filtering system is automatically set up on many Internet service providers or email services, which help to sort the spam from the important emails.

While these blocking systems are mostly doing a great job, they do not always know exactly what you, as a user, want and you may find an email that you are waiting for is being blocked. Not everybody has the same idea of what spam is. What one person considers spam, another may consider important information. You may find that you are no longer receiving emails that you have subscribed to. So, what can you do to ensure you receive all the emails you are expecting? Make an email whitelist.

Here are some instructions on creating whitelists on different email systems.

G-Mail 

1. Find an email, in your inbox, that you have received from a website you subscribed to. You will often receive a welcome email. You may find this in the promotions folder.
2. Drag that email into the primary folder and all your emails from this address will go to this inbox in the future.

Yahoo

1. In Yahoo mail, you will see a ‘+’ symbol next to the “From:” box with the name of the sender of the email.
2. To add this sender to your white list it’s as simple as clicking this box, selecting ‘add to contacts’ and hitting ‘save’ on the pop up box.
   

Mac Mail

1. In your mail program. Go to the top menu select ‘mail’, then ‘preferences’.
   
2. Select the ‘rules’ icon, and choose ‘add rule
   
3. Fill in all the required details.
   1. Add a description. (You may just want to put the senders name here.)
   2. Choose ‘any ‘ in the first drop down box.
   3. Choose ‘from’ in the second drop down box.
   4. Choose ‘contains’ from the third drop down box.
      1. It should now read as “If any of the following conditions are met: From Contains”
   5. Type in the sender’s email address you wish to add to your white list in the text field next to contains.
   6. Select ‘move message’ and ‘inbox’ in the next two drop down boxes.
4. Click ‘ok’ and the rule will be saved.

Outlook 2003 & later

1. From the ‘home’ tab in your email folder, select ‘rules’ and ‘create rule’
   
2. Fill in the required details.
   1. Give the rule a name.
   2. Select ‘from’ and ‘contains’ from the dropdown boxes.
   3. Add the email address by selecting ‘add search terms’
   4. Select ‘move to folder’ and ‘inbox’
   5. Click ‘ok’