Spam: Blacklists & Whitelists

There has been a lot of time spent talking about Blacklists, but what about Whitelists? A Whitelist is the opposite of a Blacklist--in order to send any e-mail to someone using a Whitelist you have to be approved and verified. You are approved and verified by being listed in the Whitelist. A Whitelist is a list of IP addresses which are trusted implicitly. That means all e-mail will be accepted from them if the sender of the e-mail is on the Whitelist. Anyone sending e-mail to a server using a Whitelist must be on the list or it will be sent back.

Why would someone use a Whitelist? For a lot of reasons. Consider a company with two locations, one on each side of the world. They want to block spam but want to send e-mail back and forth. They each set up Whitelists with each other and they now can send e-mail back and forth without ever having any spam enter anyone's mailbox because the only two IP addresses on their Whitelist is each other. Now if they only wanted to send e-mail to each other they could stop there. But if they want to receive e-mail from anyone else they need to add the new people to their Whitelist. And this is what they do; when they find a person or company they want to receive e-mail from they add them to the Whitelist. The only downside is that Whitelists require that they be set up before they are used or people won't get their e-mail. Whitelists are gaining a lot in popularity so you will see them gaining popularity in the coming months. In fact a major player in the dial-up ISP market is promoting the fact that they are using Whitelists. Basically, before any e-mail is received by anyone using the service the person sending the e-mail must identify themselves in the e-mail and then be approved by the recipient. If the recipient doesn't approve the e-mail it is sent back and never seen by the recipient.

Blacklists and Whitelists are here to stay. The abundance of spam has precipitated their use. Chances are you personally will not be involved with maintaining either a Blacklist or a Whitelist in your lifetime. But, there is a good chance in your lifetime you will run across either Blacklist or a Whitelist in your hosting account. Also, before you consider you next host you should consider whether the IP address you will be placed on is Blacklisted.

All web hosting accounts on our servers have the option of turning on SpamAssassin to help manage Spam on their hosting accounts.