TLDR; "If you expect to receive important emails from a trusted email address it is worth whitelisting the address to make sure that emails won't be accidentally blocked by an overzealous email client."

Whatever email client you use, be it Gmail or Thunderbird, Outlook or Apple Mail, you can be sure that it comes with some kind of spam management built in.

Most of the time this works well - legitimate emails are delivered to your inbox and spam is either rejected or gets funnelled to your spambox.

However, differentiating between genuine emails and spam is a notoriously difficult problem to automate and despite utilising sophisticated artificial intelligence, email clients intermittently fail to do this successfully.

This means you will occasionally see spam emails make it through to your inbox, or worse... legitimate emails may be incorrectly blocked and you miss them!

If you expect to receive important emails from a trusted email address it is worth whitelisting the address to make sure that emails won't be accidentally blocked by an overzealous email client.

You can do this for monitor@downtimemonkey.com to be 100% sure that you'll receive your email alerts if a website that you monitor goes down.

It's very unlikely that these emails would be blocked (we've never had problems) but whitelisting is straightforward and gives peace of mind.

Whitelisting is completed in the email client and each email client is different.

So far we've written posts that give step-by-step instructions (including screenshots) on how to whitelist email addresses in Gmail, Outlook for Office365, Yahoo! Mail, Mozilla Thunderbird and cPanel Webmail (i.e. Roundcube, Horde or Squirrel Mail).