How to white list in ProtonMail

ProtonMail uses a spam filtering system that inspects incoming email for malicious or illegitimate content and delivers the messages to your Spam folder or Inbox accordingly. Sometimes, this system will make a mistake by sending a message to your Spam folder that you actually want delivered to your Inbox. If you’re using secure email from ProtonMail and not receiving email from certain senders, there’s a couple things you can do to ensure messages from trusted senders are delivered to your Inbox by customizing your spam filtering settings using the methods such adding a sender to contacts, adding an email address to your Allow List and setting custom filters.

Using the Allow List

The ProtonMail Allow List (also known as a “white list” or “safe sender list”) ensures messages from the senders you specify are always sent you inbox. Any email address in your contact list is automatically included in the Allow List, but if you don’t want to add a certain sender to your contact, you can simply add the sender’s email address to your Allow List instead for the same effect.

To access the Filter options you need to go to Settings and then Filters:

There are two ways to add an email address to your Allow List: 1) manually moving a message to the inbox, and 2) adding the email address to the list directly.

Move to inbox

You can easily add email addresses to the Allow List finding the desired message in your Spam folder, selecting the message, then choosing the Move to inbox option on that message. This will move the message you selected to your inbox and add the sender’s email address to your Allow List at the same time but you need to receive a message from the sender that went to spam before you can use this method. If you have the email address of a sender you want to white list before their messages end up in spam, use the next method to add the address first.

Add an address manually

To manually add a sender’s email address to the Allow List:

1. Sign in to your ProtonMail account on a computer
2. Select Settings found at the top of the window
3. Select the Filters tab
4. Select ADD NEW FILTER under the Allow List section.
5. Enter the email address of the sender
6. Select the SAVE button

Additional Spam Filter Customization

In addition to the Allow List (White List) method, ProtonMail also provides custom filters to add more filtering parameters to your spam filtering. You can learn more about these filter options here: https://protonmail.com/support/knowledge-base/filters/.

For more help

Receiving
If you need more help receiving email messages as a ProtonMail user, visit their support site.

Sending
If you’re an email sender having trouble sending email to ProtonMail recipients, visit the ProtonMail support site.

Did this guide work for you?

Let us know if this guide for ProtonMail worked for you by leaving a comment below. While we strive to keep our guides up-to-date and relevant, sometimes things change without notice. If you find something is different in your ProtonMail account from this guide, let us know what you had to do differently. Thanks for your help and input!

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