whitelist

The action of adding an e-mail address to your address box to ensure you receive it.

Since spam has become such a big problem, most e-mail services and Internet Service Providers (ISPs) have put some sort of blocking or filtering system in place to tell the good guys from the bad. Unfortunately these systems for stopping spam are far from perfect and they often block e-mail messages that you have, in fact, requested (also known as a false positive).

To make sure you receive the newsletters and e-mails you want, whitelist every new subscription right at the start, before delivery is interrupted. This means adding the address in the "From" line of a valued e-mail to your address book.

As you've probably realized by now, technology is complicated and the instructions for whitelisting are different for every e-mail system :-( NetLingo is here to help! Use the link below to read whitelist instructions for the most popular e-mail programs!

FYI: In computing, a "blacklist" is an access control mechanism that means allow everybody except members of the blacklist. The opposite is a "whitelist" which means allow nobody except members of the white list. As a sort of middle ground, there is something called a "greylist" which serves as a temporary blacklist that could be used, for example, to block poorly-configured e-mail clients that may be used to send undesirable e-mail. And yet another form of list is the "yellow list" which is a list of e-mail server IP addresses that send mostly good e-mail but do send some spam (for example, Yahoo!, Hotmail, Gmail). The term "yellow listed server" is a server that should never be accidentally blacklisted. The yellow list is checked first and if listed then black list tests are ignored.