Whitelist

The Whitelist is a list of email addresses and domains from which you always wish to receive emails. i.e., mails sent from these email addresses or domains will never be marked as spam. You can also configure keywords, which if found in the body or subject, will automatically whitelist the email.

Screenshot 32 - Whitelisted domains

The configuration of the Whitelist is done from the Anti Spam > Whitelist node. Right-click on this node to bring up the Whitelist properties. The first tab is the Whitelist configuration.

Screenshot 33 - Adding a whitelisted email entry

To add a whitelisted domain or email address:

1. Click Add and specify the full email address. If you wish to specify an entire domain, specify it as follows `*@companysupport.com'. The `*' is a wildcard to include all email addresses from that domain. You can also specify wildcards and whitelist entire domain suffixes, for example *@*.mil or *@*.edu. The latter will for example ensure that mail sent from military or educational domains will never be marked as spam.

2. Specify `Check Mime to:' OR `Check Mime from:'. This option allows you to whitelist an email recipient. The MIME TO: is the email address to which the email is addressed. To find out the MIME TO: open up a copy of the list mail/newsletter and double click on the TO: field. Enter the email address shown in the `Add List' dialog.

Some newsletters use mailers that do not address the sender in the MIME TO field causing the GFI MailEssentials header checking feature to mark it as spam. These should be whitelisted with the MIME TO: option

NOTE: If you want to exclude a user from spam filtering, simply enter the email address of the user, and select MIME TO:

Auto whitelist

Screenshot 34 - Auto Whitelist options

This feature, when enabled, automatically whitelists email addresses to which you send mail. Clearly you will want to receive a reply from anyone you send a mail to; automatic whitelisting therefore makes a lot of sense. The process is completely automatic - you will have a reliable and constantly updated whitelist in no time and without any administration! You can specify the total amount of email addresses to be stored in the whitelist up to a maximum of 30,000 addresses. After the maximum amount is reached, the oldest records get replaced. The Auto Whitelist is made up of two components. One component scans incoming emails and matches their senders against the auto whitelist. If the sender is present in the list, the mail will be passed on directly to the recipient's inbox without applying further spam checking. This feature is by default enabled, but you can still disable it by unmarking the `Check emails against Auto Whitelist' option in the whitelist properties page. The second component extracts the destination email addresses from outbound emails and automatically adds them to the autowhitelist.mdb for use by the first component. This feature is also enabled by default, but you can still disable it by unmarking the `Populate Auto Whitelist automatically' option in the whitelist properties page. You can view auto whitelist entries by selecting the `Show automatically entered' option in the filter dropdown located at the top (right) of the page, near the Email address/Domain display list.

We highly recommend using these features, since they allow GFI MailEssentials to achieve a very low rate of false positives.

Whitelisted keywords

Screenshot 35 - Whitelisting keywords

GFI MailEssentials allows you to specify keywords, which cause the mail to be flagged as HAM (valid mail). If a keyword configured in the keyword whitelist is found in a mail, then GFI MailEssentials will automatically allow the mail to skip all anti spam filters and deliver the mail directly the user's inbox.

Use this option carefully, since entering too many keywords will allow too much spam to skip the spam filters. You can configure whitelisted keywords for body and subject:

To specify whitelisted keywords in the message body, click on the whitelisted keywords (body) tab and select Add.
To specify whitelisted keywords in the subject, click on the whitelisted keywords (subject) tab and select Add.

IP Whitelist

Screenshot 36 - Whitelisting IPs

GFI MailEssentials allows you to bypass anti spam checks on mails sent from servers whose IP address is specified in the IP Whitelist. Mails sent from listed servers are automatically classified as valid mail and are directly delivered in the user's inbox. To enable this feature, click on the IP Whitelist tab in the whitelist properties and mark on `Enter IP's from which mails are classified as HAM ...' option. In this page, you can also specify IP's to be added to the whitelist, as well as delete or make changes to the IP details already available.

Screenshot 37 - IP entry dialogue

To add IP's to the whitelist, click on the Add button. In the IP entry dialogue on display, you can specify the IP of a single computer as well as a range of IP's for a group of computers, by marking the `Group of computers' option and entering the relative subnet address and subnet mask.