How to Whitelist in Gmail

Gmail has a fantastic built-in spam filter, but no spam filter is absolutely perfect. Sometimes, we might run into a situation where a much-anticipated email actually ends up in the spam folder.

Why build a whitelist

If you’ve ever been anxiously waiting to receive an email from a potential new flame, or potential job offer, you want to make very sure the important message is not going to be banished as spam.

To avoid messages you do want to receive from being send straight to spam is the one and most important reason to have a so-called ‘whitelist’.

2 ways to whitelist in Gmail:

1. Adding senders to your contact list

When you receive an email, and you want to make sure you keep receiving messages from the same person in the future, you can do this by adding the sender to your contact list:

• Open a received email message
• Click on the little down-pointing arrow next to “reply”:
• Click on “Add “yousafesender@senderyoulike.com” to Contacts list”
• Now Gmail will tell you the sender has successfully been added to your contacts list, which automatically means you will be receiving all future emails from this sender:

2. Creating a filter

This method can be used to add one individual sender (for example, John@peopleyoulike.com), or all senders from a particular server (for example, everyone sending mail from @peopleyoulike.com).

• Click on “Settings”
• Go to “Filters”
• Click “Create a new filter”:
• Type the email address you want to whitelist in the “from” field. You can type a full address, such as “John@peopleyoulike.com”, or just “@peopleyoulike.com” if you expect to receive emails from different people with email addresses ending in “@peopleyoulike.com”:
• Click “next step”
• Check “never send to spam”:
• Click “create filter”

And you’re done! There are two ways of whitelisting a sender in Gmail, and now you should be able to use both methods.