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The whitelist is an advanced system for automatically filtering out emails with a false return address. Most unsolicited email falls into this category, so the whitelist can be a very effective tool for stopping spam. The whitelist does this by sending a “challenge” the first time you receive an email from a new address. Once the sender replies to the challenge, their address is “whitelisted” — all further emails from that address pass through the whitelist system.

To illustrate this, imagine you have whitelisting enabled and have just received an email from user@example.com, who you have not exchanged emails with before. Here is what would happen:

• The new email is stored here in your whitelist queue.
• A “challenge” email is sent to user@example.com asking them to verify that user@example.com is a real address.
• user@example.com clicks on the Reply button in their mail program and sends back a response proving that their address is valid.
• The response is received by Port995 and the original email is taken out of your whitelist queue and delivered to you.

By contrast, here is what happens when an email with a false return address is received:

• The new email is stored here in your whitelist queue.
• A “challenge” email is sent to user@example.com asking them to verify that user@example.com is a real address.
• No response is received and the queued email is deleted after one week.

Although responding to the challenge email really is as simple as clicking the Reply button, you should bear in mind that some senders may not respond to the challenge.

Enabling Whitelisting

If you would like to use whitelisting for some of your mailboxes, log into your control panel and tick the Whitelist box for those accounts. You should probably now select the Whitelist page and manually add any addresses that you know will be sending email to that account. This is not necessary, but it will allow them to bypass the challenge email.

There are a number of configuration options you can use to change the behavior of the whitelist:

Number of attempts per address

If more than this number of emails are received from the same address without the sender confirming their address, the address will be assumed to be false and “Blacklisted”. All emails from that address will then be bounced instead of added to your queue.

Pending message

This is the text for the challenge message which will be emailed to the sender. You can use this to explain in your own words what the challenge email is for and what they should do to confirm their address.

Blacklist Message

This is the text for the email sent to notify someone that they have been added to the blacklist.

Adding a Manual Whitelist Entry

Manually adding a whitelist entry allows you to tell the whitelist system that you know a particular address is “good” and any emails from that address should be accepted without challenge. If the address is already listed as Pending, make sure you delete the Pending entry first.

First, ensure you are on the correct page in the control panel, by clicking on the Whitelist button from the left-hand menu. If you do not yet have any whitelist entries, this screen will be mostly empty. To manually add a new whitelist entry, simply click on the Create button.

The fields in the new whitelist entry are as follows:

Address

This is the email address which you want to add to your list of accepted addresses. Enter the full address in the form user@example.com.

Status

This is the current status of the address and can be either Whitelisted, Blacklisted or Pending. Whitelisted means that the address is known to be valid and emails will be accepted from it without challenge. Blacklisted means that the sender was sent several challenge emails, but did not respond. A status of Pending means that the sender has been sent a challenge but has not yet responded. Their emails are still queued on our server awaiting their response. Note that you cannot manually change the status of a whitelist entry. Any manual entries will be Whitelisted. If you want to stop emails from a particular address, you can create a block instead.

Number of Attempts per Address

This lists how many attempts the sender has remaining to confirm their address before their address will be blacklisted.

Time before pending entries are removed

This is the length of time (in days) before a whitelist entry in the Pending state will be deleted along with all it's queued emails. This helps keep your whitelist from growing indefinitely.

Removing a Blacklist Entry

You can delete any entries on the Whitelist page including a Blacklisted entry by clicking on the corresponding Delete button.

Accessing the Whitelist Queue

If you need to access any of your queued messages manually for any reason, you can access the whitelist queue as if it were an ordinary mailbox. To do this, first set a password for it from the Account settings section in your control panel, then configure your email program to access the queue using the username whitelist:example.port995.com and the password you have set up.

Your queue mailbox will contain a folder called “Pending” containing all the emails currently held awaiting confirmation. You can make delete or move these emails in the same way as emails in any other mailbox.

There may also be some email in your main “INBOX” folder. These are emails which the whitelist system cannot deal with automatically. For example, if you delete a Pending entry from your whitelist without creating a corresponding Whitelisted entry, it's not clear what should be done with the queued emails corresponding to this entry.

Remember that POP does not support multiple folders. If you use POP to access your whitelist mailbox, you will not be able to view messages in your “Pending” folder. You will still be able to download the messages in the main “INBOX” folder so that you can deal with them manually, however.

Notes

• The aim of the whitelist is to automatically block emails from non-existent addresses. This is independent of whether or not you actually want to receive emails from that address. If you would like to block emails from a specific address, use a block on the envelope sender.
• Unlike adding manual blocks, the whitelist does not require you to keep a list of addresses up-to-date. Instead, the burden of maintaining the whitelist is placed on the senders of email. How they will react to this depends on the sort of correspondents you have. You should consider the sort of people who you expect to receive emails from when deciding whether to use the whitelist and when writing the messages they will receive.
• The whitelist is ideally suited to a mailbox which receives emails from only a few addresses. A mailbox which frequently receives (wanted) emails from new addresses will require a lot of confirmation and increase the chances that one of the senders may not confirm their address.

• When signing up for a mailing list, and you are unable to add a manual whitelist entry in advance because you do not know the address the emails will come from, we recommend disabling the whitelist until the first email arrives. You can then manually add the address to your whitelist and re-enable the whitelist. If you wait for the first email address from the list to arrive in your Pending queue and then add the whitelist entry, the “Challenge” email may cause some problems depending on how the mailing list handles it.

  Alternatively, you can create a new mailbox just for the mailing list and sign up using that address. Once you have completed the sign-up procedure, you can enable whitelisting for that mailbox and alter it to forward to your main mailbox (if you prefer). This is a form of tagged email address.