Trusted Senders vs. Blocked Senders

Trusted Senders are commonly called whitelisted or allowlisted senders. These are email addresses or domains that you trust and want SmarterMail to treat as safe. Messages from Trusted Senders are less likely to be marked as spam or filtered into junk. Blocked Senders are the opposite. These are commonly called blacklisted or blocklisted senders. Messages from blocked addresses or domains are treated as unwanted and may be moved to Junk Email or deleted, depending on your spam filtering settings.

• A Trusted Email Address should be used when you want to trust one specific sender, such as jane@example.com.
• A Trusted Domain should be used when you want to trust all email coming from a company or organization, such as example.com.

Be careful with Trusted Domains. For example, it would usually be a bad idea to trust gmail.com, outlook.com, or yahoo.com, because that would potentially trust mail from anyone using those services. For Gmail or other public email services, add the person’s full email address instead.

All Smartermail users can mange their own Trusted Sender (and Blocked Sender) list from the webmail interface at https://wm.gds.us. DOMAIN ADMINS can control the Trusted Sender list for the entire domain – affecting all users.

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Adding Trusted Senders as a User

To add a trusted sender for your own mailbox:

1. Go to Settings in the top menu.
2. In the left menu, click Spam Filtering.
3. Find the Trusted Senders section.
4. To trust an entire domain, click the edit pencil beside Trusted Domains.
   • Example: add example.com to trust all senders from that domain. The domain is what follows the @ sign in an email address.
   • One per line
   • Click OK
5. To trust one specific sender, click the edit pencil beside Trusted Email Addresses.
   • Example: add jane@example.com to trust only that specific sender.
   • One per line
   • Click OK
6. Save your changes.
   • Top left (above Options)

These settings apply only to your own mailbox.

SmarterMail Trusted Sender PDF

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Adding Trusted Senders as a Domain Admin

A domain admin has two possible places to manage spam filtering, and the difference matters.

If the domain admin goes to Settings, those changes affect only the admin’s own mailbox, just like a regular user. This is useful if the admin only wants to trust a sender personally.

To make changes for everyone at the domain:

1. Open the top menu and choose Domain Settings.
2. In the left menu, click Spam Filtering.
3. Find the Trusted Senders section.
4. Click the edit pencil beside Trusted Domains to add a domain for all users.
   • Example: add vendorcompany.com if everyone in your organization regularly receives legitimate email from that vendor.
5. Click the edit pencil beside Trusted Email Addresses to add a specific sender for all users.
   • Example: add billing@vendorcompany.com if only that address needs to be trusted.
6. Save your changes.

Domain-level Trusted Senders affect all mailboxes in that domain, so they should be used carefully. In general, trust a full domain only when you are confident that the entire organization sends legitimate email. For individual people, especially those using Gmail, Yahoo, Outlook, Comcast, or other public email providers, add the full email address instead of the domain.