How To Whitelist an Email Address in Gmail

Spam filtering is an excellent tool that saves a lot of time as it recognizes potential spam messages and flags them as spam automatically saving you time going through a pack-filled inbox. But it isn't always 100% accurate.

If you are having trouble with the Gmail client flagging some emails as spam even though those emails are from a trusted source you may want to whitelist the source email address. In this quick tutorial, we will guide you through each and every step.

Option 1: Creating new Gmail contact

To tell Google’s spam filter that you want to receive messages from a certain email address, simply add the address to your Gmail contacts. This will indicate that the sender is in fact trusted by you and you want to receive their messages.

Unfortunately, it does not guarantee that those messages won't go to spam ever again. To be 100% certain please see the next option.

In Gmail on the web:

1. Open the email from a sender you want to whitelist
2. Click on the sender’s profile picture (info box will open)
3. Click on the Add to Contacts icon in the top-right corner of the box

In Gmail on the phone:

1. Open the email from a sender you want to whitelist
2. Click on the sender’s profile picture (action sheet will pop up)
3. Click on the Add to Contacts icon in the top-right corner of the box

Option 2: Creating a filter rule

To completely prevent all emails from a specific sender to be marked as spam, you can create a custom filter rule. This is Gmail's alternative to whitelist.

Note that this can only be done in the desktop version of Gmail.

In Gmail on the web:

1. Click on the Show search options icon in the search bar at the top (A form will pop up)
2. Enter the sender's email address into the From field (this address will be whitelisted)
3. Click on the Create filter at the bottom right corner (selection of check-boxes will appear)
4. Select Never send it to spam
5. Click on Create filter

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