Whitelist Email Addresses In Gmail

In the last blog post we answered the question: Why Whitelist an Email Address?

TLDR; “If you expect to receive important emails from a trusted email address it is worth whitelisting the address to make sure that emails won’t be accidentally blocked by an overzealous email client.”

Here we provide step-by-step instructions on how to do it in Gmail by creating a filter:

1) Login to Gmail, click on the gear icon and select “Settings”:

select Gmail settings

2) Select “Filters and blocked addresses”:

select Gmail filters

3) Scroll past all your existing filters and select “Create a new filter”:

create new filter Gmail

4) Add the email address that you want to whitelist to the “From” field. Here we added monitor@downtimemonkey.com to make sure that we never miss a ‘website down’ alert:

add email to filter Gmail

5) Check the “Never send to spam” box and click “Create Filter”. The email address will now be whitelisted!

create filter Gmail

Whitelisting A Whole Domain

In ‘Step 4’ we whitelisted a single email address. It’s also possible to whitelist all emails from a domain.

By adding @downtimemonkey.com to the “From” field instead of monitor@downtimemonkey.com we would whitelist every email address belonging to downtimemonkey.com.

Whitelisting Multiple Email Addresses

To whitelist more than one email address simply add each email address separated by the pipe symbol. For example, “monitor@downtimemonkey.com | verify@downtimemonkey.com”.

The pipe symbol is a vertical bar ‘|’ that can be added with shift and backslash on most keyboards.