Instructions to whitelist an email address in Gmail

Having a gmail email address, even for your business, is a very useful thing to have, because it allows you to gain access to all Google's other features that can be used to help your business. In Google's own words... "Google My Business is a free and easy-to-use tool for businesses and organizations to manage their online presence across Google, including Search and Maps." It often makes it easier for potential and existing customers to find your business online.

One of the problems you might encounter though, is that when a contact or enquirer sends an email to your gmail, you might find that instead of going to your inbox it ends up in the junk folder. This can be annoying and occasionally happens even when it's a legitimate email, and not spam, which gmail is normally very good at filtering out. So if you find that genuine emails from important contacts are going into the junk folder, then by whitelisting their email address you can avoid this happening. In this short tutorial you can follow the steps you should take to avoid this problem occurring.

So what does it mean to whitelist?

The word 'whitelist' means the opposite of 'blacklist'. In other words, to allow specified entities access to something, for example a service. It also means to be accepted, or a state of recognition. You can whitelist a specified email address so that it will always be allowed to come through to your inbox without being stopped or filtered out into your junk folder, such as often happens with suspected spam emails.

How to whitelist an email address in Gmail

The following step by step instructions will show you how to do this in your gmail settings.

1. First, log into your Gmail account and click on the cog icon to access the 'settings' page. If necessary, click the 'See all settings' link to reveal all the main settings tabs.

2. Next, select the 'Filters and blocked addresses' tab. (see fig.1)