Have you ever noticed that the emails you send to your email list sit in the spam folder? As a result, your clients, customers, and prospects may have missed an important update, a fantastic deal, or a free offer you sent out (and you may have experienced the same thing from businesses you love!). In this article, you will learn how to ask your clients to whitelist your email address so your emails won’t end up in their spam folders again.

Why Emails Sometimes Go to Spam

Email providers like Gmail, Outlook, and Yahoo use automated filters to decide where emails should go. These filters try to protect you from spam, scams, and unwanted messages. They look at many factors, such as:

  • Whether you have opened emails from that sender before
  • Whether the sender is in your contacts
  • Whether other people marked similar emails as spam
  • How you interact with messages from that sender

Because these filters are automated, they sometimes make mistakes. An email you want can occasionally end up in the spam folder. That’s why it helps to tell your email provider which senders you trust.

What Does it Mean to “Whitelist”?

In the past, people often used the term “whitelist” (think of it as the opposite of “blacklist”). Today, most email providers use terms like Safe Senders List or Allow List instead.

When you add an email address to your contacts or Safe Senders List, you are telling your email system that you trust messages from that sender and want to receive them.

Because spam filters are automated, they sometimes send emails you want into the spam folder by mistake. Adding an email address to your contacts or Safe Senders List helps your email provider recognize that messages from that address are welcome.

If you don’t yet have an email marketing system, you can read more about different email marketing systems and how they compare.

Below, you will learn how to add an email address to your Safe Senders List using several popular email providers.

How to Whitelist Emails with Web-based Email Clients

Watch this short video and then follow the steps below to whitelist email addresses in Gmail.

 

Gmail

First: Add the email address to your Contacts

  1. Open one of the emails from the sender.
  2. Hover over the sender’s name at the top of the email.
  3. Click Add to Contacts.

Adding a sender to your contacts helps Gmail recognize that you want to receive their messages.

Second: If the email went to Spam

  1. Open your Spam folder.
  2. Open the email.
  3. Click Report not spam.

Gmail will move the message to your inbox and learn that emails from that sender are safe.

Optional: Create a filter

If you want extra control, you can create a filter so Gmail never sends emails from a certain address to spam.

  1. Click the Settings gear in Gmail.
  2. Select See all settings.
  3. Click the Filters and Blocked Addresses tab.
  4. Click Create a new filter.
  5. Enter the email address in the From field.
  6. Click Create filter.
  7. Check Never send it to Spam, then click Create filter.

Yahoo Mail

First: Add the email address to your Contacts

  1. Open an email from the sender.
  2. Click the sender’s name at the top of the message.
  3. Select Add to Contacts.
  4. Save the contact.

Second: If the email went to Spam

  1. Open the Spam folder.
  2. Open the email.
  3. Click Not Spam.

Outlook.com (includes Hotmail, MSN, and Windows Live)

  1. Click the Settings gear in the top-right corner.
  2. Select View all Outlook settings.
  3. Click Mail → Junk email.
  4. Under Safe senders and domains, add the email address or domain name.
  5. Press Enter to save.

You can also add the sender to your contacts, which helps Outlook recognize trusted messages.

 

How to Whitelist Emails with Desktop Email Clients

Outlook

  1. Go to the “Home” tab.
  2. Click on the “Junk” in the “Delete” group, and select “Junk Email Options.”
  3. Under the “Safe Senders” tab, click “Add” and enter the email addresses you want to whitelist.
  4. Click “OK.”

 Mac OS X Mail

The easiest method is simply to add the sender to your Contacts.

  1. Open an email from the sender.
  2. Click the sender’s name.
  3. Choose Add to Contacts.

Apple Mail will treat emails from that sender as trusted.

 

Whitelist Your Email Address on Your Mobile Devices

iOS Devices – iPad, iPhone, iPod Touch

  1. Find any emails you want to whitelist.
  2. Tap the sender and add to either a new contact or an existing contact.

Android Devices – Samsung, Google Nexus, others

  1. In the default email client, touch the sender’s picture thumbnail in any email from us.
  2. Click OK to add to contacts.

Final Thoughts

Automatic email filters are helpful – they help manage email overwhelm. But they’re not perfect. Sometimes the emails you send to your subscribers may end up in the spam folder – even when people genuinely want to receive them. To sum up, there are two main ways to mark an email as safe (whitelisted): add the sender to your contacts or mark the sender as Not Spam.

I recommend asking your clients to add the email addresses you use to send emails to their contacts or Safe Senders List. (And of course, you’ll want to do the same for the people you want to receive emails from.) Doing this makes it much more likely that emails from that address will arrive safely in the inbox instead of the spam folder.

(Originally Published Oct 2019; Updated March 2026)

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