How to Whitelist the Contacts You Want to Hear From

Date October 10, 2008

Have you ever signed up for an email newsletter and never received it? Chances are good that the message you were looking for went into the junk folder of your email program. Yahoo! regularly dumps items that I would like to read into the “spam” folder, which fills up very quickly with all sorts of junk email.

Whitelisting email addresses is the practice of flagging wanted email senders so that your mail program won’t mislabel the things you want to read as spam, essentially hiding it from you.

Since many of us use different email programs for reading our email, here’s the steps you’ll need for the most popular mail programs to whitelist your desired contacts.

For Yahoo! users -

1. Open your Yahoo mailbox and click on “Mail Options”.
2. Click “Filters”
3. Next, click “Add Filter”
4. In the top row, labeled “From Header:” make sure “contains” is selected.
5. Click in the text box next to that drop-down menu, and enter the address that you want to whitelist
6. Select “Inbox” from the menu near the bottom where it says “Move the message to:”
7. Click the “Add Filter” button again.

For AOL users -

1. Go to “Mail Controls” and select your screen name
2. Click “Customize Mail Controls For This Screen Name.”
3. Select “Allow e-mail from all AOL members, e-mail addresses and domains”.
4. Click “Next” until the Save button shows up at the bottom
5. Click “Save.”

For Hotmail.com users -

1. Click the “Options” tab
2. Under “Mail Handling” select “Safe List”
3. In the space provided enter the address that you want to whitelist
4. Click “Add”
5. When you see the address you entered in the Safe List box, click “OK.

For those of you using POP3 mail clients, like Thunderbird or Outlook, investigate the filtering options to whitelist email addresses.

Here a Widget, There a Widget

Date September 25, 2008

Speaking of widgets…check out all the free widgets that you can download from Widgetbox.

Just click on a word in the tag cloud to browse through widgets in that category. You’ll find some fun widgets that would go well on a MySpace or iGoogle page.

Most of these widgets will appeal to users of personal pages, but most aren’t suited for more professional websites. A couple exceptions would be the countdown clocks and color picker widgets for those of us in marketing or design.

One neat twist is that you can make your own widgets. Take your Flash, HTML, JS or blog content and turn it into a widget that you can share with your whole community.

Need a New Website Design? Check Out Open Source Templates!

Date September 24, 2008

Need a new site design? Get some ideas by leafing through Open Source Web Design. Hundreds of templates are ready for you to download.

Browse the designs by validation level, images, css, color, contrast (dark on light or light on dark) and the number of columns.

Save a little time by not re-inventing the wheel and pick up an open source design today!