In this post, I will discuss about two common terms in email marketing, email white list and email black list.
Email Whitelist: An email whitelist is also known as an approved list or a safe sender list. An email whitelist is maintained by the email subscribers’ servers for filtering email addresses. It is used for allowing the emails to be sent to the recipients Inbox which are whitelisted. Email addresses, sender IP addresses and sender domains which are in the whitelist will surely be sent to the inbox. If a whitelist is an exclusive one then only the email addresses which are in the whitelist will go through. Rest of all the emails will end up in the junk mail or the spam folder of the recipient. If you want to receive an email from a particular source which is important to you then, the best rule of thumb is to whitelist that domain or the email address from which you are anticipating the emails. Whitelisting can be done from the settings in your email client.
Email Blacklist: An email blacklist or block list is maintained by the email subscribers’ servers for preventing certain emails to be delivered in the inbox. Email addresses which are blacklisted will always end up in the junk mail or the spam folder of the recipient. Usually, subscribers blacklist a domain, email address or an IP address when they receive junk mail, spam, unsolicited emails or any other type of unwanted email messages. You can check a if a mail server is blacklisted or not by using this tool.