How to Whitelist Email Addresses of Your Favorite Senders

"Read This and Follow the Simple Instructions..."

With the tremendous amounts of spam emails sent these days, major ISPs and Email Services such as Google Gmail, Yahoo!, MSN Hotmail, AOL and others are protecting themselves and their users by filtering emails in the attempt to thwart spammers' operations.

Unfortunately, sometimes legitimate email may be blocked or delivered to your spam/bulk/junk folder by mistake by these filters. Such mistakes are called "false-positives".

If you're expecting important emails from someone (like us) and you do not want those emails to be delivered to the wrong folder, you can easily fix this yourself and it will only take a minute.

Here's what you can do...

Click on each link (below) based on the email system you're using and then follow the simple step-by-step instructions to perform whitelisting:

Gmail

  1. Click Contacts along the left side of any Gmail page.

  2. Click New Contact (displayed as ) at the top left.

  3. Copy and paste the to-be-whitelisted email address: johndoe@example.com into the Email field on the right.

  4. Click the Save button.

If the sender's previous email was sent to your Spam folder, you can follow the steps below to whitelist the sender:

  1. Click Spam along the left side of any Gmail page.

  2. Check the box against the sender's email.

  3. Click the Not Spam button just a few lines above.

Hotmail

  1. Click Options along the top right hand and then select More options... from the dropdown menu.

  2. Under the sub-header Junk e-mail, click Safe and blocked senders.

  3. Under the header Safe and blocked senders click Safe senders and then add johndoe@example.com into the field provided.

If the sender's previous email was sent to your Junk folder, you can follow the steps below to whitelist the sender:

  1. Click Junk along the left side of the page.

  2. Check the box against the sender's email.

  3. Click the Not junk link just right above.

AOL

  1. Click the Mail menu and select Address Book.

  2. Wait for the Address Book window to pop up, then click the Add button.

  3. Wait for the Address Card for New Contact window to load.

  4. Once loaded, copy and paste johndoe@example.com into the Other E-Mail field.

  5. Set the email address as the Primary E-Mail address by checking the associated check box.

  6. Click the Save button.

Yahoo! Mail

At the time of writing, Yahoo doesn't seem to provide an easy way to whitelist email addresses. Instead, it requires you to do specific filtering to allow your favorite senders' emails to get through to your inbox in terms of using header or subject to identify the senders.

I don't know how effective this is to you, but from what I heard, Yahoo! Mail is not so reliable in terms of email delivery even though the filter has been set, unlike Gmail.

So I would advise you to have an alternative email address like Gmail. By the way, Gmail is faster and their spam filter is much better and reliable than many other paid email clients.

It all boils down to the change of habit if you're willing to. If you get to use Gmail for just 8 days, you'll begin to dislike Yahoo! Mail and Hotmail in terms of speed and user-friendliness. That's my personal experience.

Anyway, here's something you can do at least to whitelist your favorite senders if their previous emails were sent to your Spam folder:

  1. Click Spam along the left side of the page.

  2. Check the box against the sender's email.

  3. Click the Not Spam button just right above.

Others

If you need to whitelist someone before they ever start sending you any email, most email clients' whitelisting function (if they do provide) are somewhat similar.

Either you go to Options, Mail Options, Address Book or ... just knock around some links or buttons and you might find the way.

Or get help straight from your email provider.

Alternatively, you can easily whitelist your sender's email only after they've sent you the first piece.

Like Gmail, Hotmail and Yahoo, check out your email client software to see if they offer you the ease to declare that particular sender's email to be 'not spam' or 'not junk', if they do, easy for you.

In fact, nowadays many email client software are adopting what Gmail is offering to its users, so it shouldn't be a hard problem for you to whitelist your sender's emails.



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