How to mark an email sender as safe
Your email client has the difficult task of determining what is and isn’t spam, and it doesn’t always work perfectly. Marking a sender as safe will prevent your email client from accidentally deleting your emails.
We’ve gotten a few emails recently from readers who, due to bugs in certain spam filters, haven’t been receiving their daily newsletter. We’re working on fixing this issue but, in the meantime, here’s how you can ensure that any email you want to receive won’t be incorrectly marked as spam.
Gmail
First you’ll need to log in to your Gmail account and then open your inbox. Now find an email sent by someone from whom you’ll always want to receive emails, such as a trusted publication or a friend. Now click the checkbox next to the email and click the ‘More’ box located on the menu bar just above your emails. From the dropdown menu that appears, click the ‘Filter messages like these’ option.
You will now be presented with the ‘Create a Filter’ menu. This menu allows you to filter your emails in all sorts of ways, but for now we just want to mark a sender as safe.
If, for example, you selected one of our emails to add to your safe senders list, you’ll notice that the ‘from’ box contains newsletters@yourlifechoices.com.au. This is all that needs to be entered on this screen. Now, click the ‘Create filter with this search’ button at the bottom right of the box.
The next screen will give you several options. The one you are looking for is ‘Never send it to Spam’. Once you’ve found it, left-click to tick the check box. Now click the ‘create filter’ button and you’re done!
Outlook website (formerly Hotmail)
Open up the Outlook website and log in to your account. Now open your inbox and click the gear icon at the top right of the screen, then click ‘Options’.
Now look for the ‘Junk email’ heading on the left-hand side and then click ‘Safe senders’, located beneath. Now enter the name of a sender you would like to mark as safe, such as ‘newsletters@yourlifechoices.com.au’ in the text box and click the plus (+) icon.
The email address you have entered will now always be marked as safe, so you’ll never lose any emails from them.
Microsoft Outlook (program)
Open up Microsoft Outlook and click ‘Tools’ at the top menu bar, then ‘Options’ > ‘Junk Email’. If you can’t see a Tools option on the menu bar, click the ‘Home’ tab, then click ‘Junk’ (located a little below and to the right of where it says ‘Home’) and then click ‘Junk Options’.
Now that you’re in the ‘Junk Options’ menu, click the ‘Safe Senders’ tab. From here, you can manage senders who you trust and from whom you want to receive mail. One great feature is that you don’t have to add a full email address, as you can simply add the domain from which the email is being sent, such as @yourlifechoices.com.au.
Click the ‘Add’ button located on the right hand side of the ‘Safe Senders’ screen, then type in either a full email address (such as newsletters@yourlifechoices.com.au) or a domain name (such as @yourlifechoices.com.au) and click ‘OK’.
Once you have done this, you can add more addresses by clicking ‘Add’ again.
The next important step is to ensure that both of the boxes at the bottom of the menu are checked. These options will make sure that anyone in your contacts list doesn’t end up in your spam folder, and that once you email someone they will always be marked as a safe sender. This means you won’t have to go back into this menu every time you want to send an email to someone new.
Once you’ve finished, click ‘Apply’ and ‘OK’.
Apple Mail for Mac
Start by finding an email from a sender you would like to mark as safe, such as one of our daily enewsletters. Open the enewsletter and right-click where it says ‘YourLifeChoices’ at the top of the email, then click ‘Add to Contacts’.
YourLifeChoices, or whomever else you choose to mark as safe, will now be added to your address book and future emails will be automatically marked as safe.
If an email from us or someone else that you know is safe has found its way into your junk folder, right click the email and click on ‘Mark’ > ‘As Not Junk Mail’.
Apple Mail for iPhone and iPad
Start by opening up the Mail app, and opening your Inbox. Now open an email from a sender that you would like to mark as safe. Open the enewsletter and tap ‘YourLifeChoices’ at the top of the email, then tap ‘Add to Contacts’ on the following screen.
YourLifeChoices, or whomever else you choose to mark as safe, will now be added to your address book and future emails will be automatically marked as safe.
Related articles:
The worst passwords of 2015
Technology glossary
How to stop pop-up ads on Chrome, Safari, Firefox and IE
