The Importance of Whitelisting

Most of us don't think about whitelisting at all, myself included. An email has found our inbox, so we think that everything is all hunky-dory. And in an ideal world, that would be a fair assumption. However, the moment anything changes, communications that have been finding the inbox can suddenly be moved to spam… or some other folder that removes it from view.

And that's exactly what happened with the move of my email list to a different email management system in 2026.

I always knew that I would need to rebuild my "trust" with the delivery systems. This would have happened regardless of the system I moved to, simply because the email header information would have changed, and systems like Gmail need to reassess it. And this is where whitelisting plays a role.

In today's post, let's talk about the importance of whitelisting and why it's important to advise subscribers to your newsletter to whitelist your email address or domain even if they are getting your emails direct into their inbox.

What whitelisting does

Even if emails from a trusted email address are consistently placed in your inbox, it is advisable that you still whitelist that email address (or the domain as a whole). Whitelisting tells the system that even if the header information changes (like it did when I moved my list from MailerLite to Sender.net) that you still want the email to be put into your inbox. (Blacklisting emails and domains have the opposite effect, telling the system to always put those emails into spam.)

BUT the more people who whitelist an email (or domain), the higher the trust factor on a particular system, increasing the chances that emails will be placed in the inbox regardless if people whitelist your email or not.

When I was testing my onboarding automations in my new email management system, I saw the effects of not whitelisting myself.

I decided to subscribe to my own lists using a range of emails that I happen to own. The first two Gmail emails I used received the double opt-in email in the inbox with no issues. The third one… I had to hunt down the email and found it in the spam folder. I clicked the confirm button, and the first email from the welcome sequence was also found in the spam folder. That's when I registered that even I hadn't whitelisted my emails—a situation that I have since corrected.

My point here is that even if you have received emails consistently from a particular email in the past, it's still a good idea to whitelist that email—especially if you use a Gmail address to subscribe to newsletters.

The verbiage you can use

When telling those who subscribe to your newsletters to whitelist your email, you will likely need to send the message a few times. And you might need to explain the benefits of whitelisting, even if emails are finding the inbox consistently.

Within my onboarding sequence, I have the following:

If you haven't already whitelisted my email address, I encourage you to do so. Whitelisting emails within your favored email editor will ensure that important emails don't get blocked by the spam filters.

Any emails coming from me will be either from [redacted email] or [redacted email].

For more tips on how to whitelist emails within the common email programs, visit: blog.hubspot.com/marketing/email-whitelist

I deliberately redacted my email addresses above, though they are present in the version sent to subscribers. Unfortunately, I've become a target of scammers who scraped email addresses from my website. So, I don't share my email address on my website anymore (though it doesn't take a genius to work out what my email address might be).

And the reason why I link to the Hubspot article rather than maintain a whitelisting guide on my website… Well, this one comes down to simplicity.

The Hubspot article is maintained and kept up-to-date with the latest information, including with updated screenshots of the various email editor programs and full instructions on what to do to whitelist emails. There is no need for me to reinvent the wheel.

Final thoughts

It's frustrating when you discover that your emails are going to spam, but in truth, as long as your domain is properly authenticated (and that's technical stuff that I'm not going to even bother talking about), then the rest of the "trust" factor falls to your subscribers.

So, encourage your subscribers to whitelist your emails, even if they consistently get your emails in their inbox.