Whitelist

The Whitelist is a list of email addresses and domains from which you always wish to receive emails. i.e., emails 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.

To configure the Whitelist, right click on the Anti-Spam > Whitelist node and select Properties from the context menu. The first tab is the Whitelist configuration.

Screenshot 42 - Whitelisted domains

To add a whitelisted domain or email address:

1. Click the Add button. The Enter Email Address/Domain dialog is displayed.

2. In the Email Address/Domain edit box you can specify a full email address, emails from an entire domain, for example ‘*@companysupport.com’ or else whitelist an entire domain suffix, for example *@*.mil or *@*.edu. The latter will for example ensure that email sent from military or educational domains will never be marked as spam.

3. To specify in which email header field this entry should be matched, so as to whitelist the email, select one of the Check… options. For example, to whitelist all inbound email sent by a specific user, select the Check MIME FROM: option.

NOTE 1: 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 Check MIME TO: option.

NOTE 2: To exclude a local user from spam filtering, simply enter the email address of the user, and select the Check MIME TO: option.

Screenshot 43 - Adding a whitelisted email entry

Auto whitelist

This feature, when enabled, automatically whitelists email addresses to which you send email. Clearly, you will want to receive a reply from anyone you send an email 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 are replaced.

Screenshot 44 - Auto Whitelist options

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 email 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 from 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 45 - Whitelisting keywords

GFI MailEssentials allows you to specify keywords, which cause the email to be flagged as ham (valid email). If a keyword configured in the keyword whitelist is found in an email, then GFI MailEssentials will automatically allow the email to skip all anti-spam filters and deliver the email directly in 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:

1.	To specify whitelisted keywords in the message body, click on the Keyword Whitelist (Body) tab and select Add.

2.	To specify whitelisted keywords in the subject, click on the Keyword Whitelist (Subject) tab and select Add.

IP Whitelist

Screenshot 46 – Whitelisting IPs

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

Screenshot 47 - IP entry dialogue

To add IP’s to the whitelist, click on the Add button. In the IP entry dialog box 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.