Jen the Dev ✨

Whitelist has been more appropriately renamed Allowlist which is what I will use for the remainder of this tutorial.

For backstory, whitelisting was a term coined to replicate the white pages of the ol’ paper phonebooks. A lot of my wiser friends will know these books well. If you’re not familiar, read up on them here.

Whitelisting is the same idea, but for electronic communication. SO – whitelist = allowlist. Capisce? 

Many e-mail and internet service providers have spent a lot of time and resources to develop programs and filtering systems to block unwanted communication from strangers and spammers. While I do love that this has been put in place, it is far from perfect and can become quite an annoyance if you’re left out in the cold and not receiving what is being sent to you. These programs and filters often block genuine senders, or companies that you’ve legitimately requested to contact you. 

This is definitely a problem.

THE QUESTION IS, HOW DO WE FIX THIS?

I’ve put together a few ways to help your provider detect what is genuine and what is not, so you can still benefit from the protection while receiving what you’re meant to get!

THE ANSWER IS: THE ALLOWLIST

An allowlist is a list of email addresses of people who you want to receive emails from (and the system will never block those).

It’s a way for you to tell your email provider that Jen Devca is my friend, and I either know her and I want to hear from her, or I’ve given her permission to send me helpful tips and tricks about all the tech things. 

DID YOU KNOW, by taking advantage of this allowlist, you’re helping the entire world? No? Well, now you do! Email providers use the way you set up your lists to make adjustments to their overall filtering system. This helps other users as well! 

THE HOW-TO:

Gmail is the most widely-used email provider across the entire globe, so I’m going to 

ONE:

Open Gmail how you normally would. Or, go to this link, mail.google.com.

Identify how you have your inbox set up. Gmail defaults to filtering emails 3 different ways: 

Primary: Person-to-person conversations between personal and business contacts.

Social: Messages from social networks, media-sharing sites, online dating services, and other social websites. 

Promotions: Marketing, interests, social and political causes (change.org, etc), and other promotional emails. 

TWO:

Search your inbox for the user you’d like to add to your allowlist. For my example, I’ll be using a colleague, Janita. Some of her emails get caught in my promotional tab because she’s another mompreneur who offers a LOT of useful insight and support for fellow moms trying to make it in this digital world. ANYWAY, search that email. 

*NOTE: If you do NOT have your email inbox set up with the 3 tabs listed above, you can skip this step*

Once you’ve found the contact you’d like to add, you’ll need to make sure they are in your primary tab. To do this, you click and hold, and drag the email into the primary tab. See example below:

THREE:

Make sure you add the user as a contact so you can always keep in touch! 

To do this, hover over the user you’d like to add to your contacts. You’ll see this little window pop up, and you’re looking for the icon in the example below:

Once you click the icon above, the icon will change to an edit icon, allowing you to change their display name, add a photo, add their home address, or any other contact information you’d like to include. If you choose not to upload a photo, and the user has not uploaded a contact photo, Google will add an avatar with the first letter of the contact’s name, as seen below.

Once you’ve completed all these steps, you’ll never miss an email from this contact again! And if they say you did, tell them to check their drafts folder 😉 

Thank you so much for reading! I hope you enjoyed this tutorial on how to manage your emails and contacts using the allowlist process. If you know someone who would benefit from my posts, please share using the social buttons below, or click here to share my newsletter.