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What is email whitelisting and blacklisting?

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Email whitelisting and blacklisting is a method used to filter your email.If you don't want email from a certain email address, then you add that email address to your blacklist.If you are positive you want all email from a certain email address, then you can add that address to your whitelist and all email sent from that address will bypass your email filters.

An advertising technique companies have become fond of using is SPAM.Spamming is the abuse of email to send unsolicited and undesired bulk messages.These messages are most often sent via email.

Spamming is very easy to do and very cheap because advertisers incur only a small cost of their mailing lists.Additionally, it is difficult to hold senders accountable for their mass mailings.Because it is so cheap to do, many companies are involved and the volume of unsolicited mail has become very high.

The costs to deal with these mass mailings continue to mount as employees have to spend time sifting through worthless email and companies spend money and effort trying to block these emails.Additionally, the Internet Service Providers have had to increase their capacity to meet the volume from spammers.

The blacklist idea was created so that once you know the address the junk was coming from, you could add it to the list.However, the spammers have found a route around this also.They change addresses very quickly and almost daily.You can end up getting the same exact junk mail from 10 different sources all in the same day.

Hence, by the time you have taken the effort to add one address to your blacklist, the spammers have moved to a new address anyway.Addresses are very cheap and spammers have hundreds of addresses.

Additionally, the blacklist will grow to the point that it is functioning as another firewall and will either reach capacity and no more addresses can be added or the list will be too time consuming for the computer to search through.

Spammers continue to come up with new techniques to get by the spam blockers also.One method to filter messages is to check the text.So if a company is soliciting people to purchase Viagra, the spam blocker can look for the word Viagra.The next generation of spam will slightly misspell Viagra, like Via_gra.The spam blocker won't recognize the new word and the spam gets through.The blocker will then be upgraded to find misspellings.However, the next generation of spam could be a picture of the text so the spam blocker can't check the text because it will see only a picture.

The whitelist is a little more useful than the blacklist.Spam blockers have been created to try and weed out the unnecessary emails.However, good email may sometimes get thrown out with the spam.So the whitelist is used to identify known addresses that you want to receive email from.All addresses added to the list will not have to be checked through the spam blocker and will not delete by accident.

The cost of time and effort maintaining the whitelist and blacklist should be considered.As mentioned earlier, the blacklist is only useful when only small amounts of unwanted mail is received, but it still takes time to add those addresses to the blacklist.The whitelist is more useful, but can be time consuming if you have many people on your contact list.The advantage though is that once you have built the list, it will help you sort your mail much faster.

In summary, blacklisting and whitelisting have very marginal value.The blacklist works if only a few items are being sent to you from unwanted sources.This would not be the large amounts of commercial spam.The whitelist is more useful and helps avoid the updated spam blockers from deleting your wanted email.

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