How to Whitelist the Contacts You Want to Hear From

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.

Posted in Spam Killing Secrets