Before we initial acquiring deep into the meat of this article its important to explain some standard terminology to make sure the rest of this article makes sense.

• An IP address is a number which identifies your location on the Internet.
  

• A blacklist is a list of IP addresses which your antispam software uses to block incoming spam.
  

• A whitelist is the exact opposite of a blacklist.
  

A whitelist is a predefined list of IP addresses that are allowed to send e-mail to and receive e mail from each other. Blacklists exclude known and suspected spammers. Whitelists can be used to exclude everyone except known IP addresses. Think of it like this. A whitelist is a like having a phonebook which is owned by a small group of all the people who only wish to speak directly to each other. They dont want just anybody ringing them. Not only that but the entire group positive need to approve new phone numbers before they appear in this exclusive phonebook.

To send electronic mail to a whitelist you must be approved by the owner of the whitelist. This is a lot like the double optin systems used by legimiate ezines and mailing list owners. Whitelists are the nightclub bouncers of the virtual world - if you aint on the list you aint grasping in. Simple but very workable.

A real world example of a whitelist would be if two companies wanted to exchange electronic mail only with each other. These companies could implement a whitelist that contained the IP address for just the two email servers that want to send e mail to each other. That would mean that any e mail coming from an IP address not on the whitelist would be returned to sender. For businesses they can ensure that employees are only dealing with work related e-mail and not chatting with their friends.

The benefits of whitelists are many but proper management of the whitelists is equally important. Misuse of whitelists will only lead to more headaches for everyone involved with missing email, irate customers and IT departments doing overtime just being the tip of the iceberg.

If youd like to learn more about spam then drop by http://www.spam-site.com today.

http://www.spam-page .com reviews and tests spam filtering software for the business and end user. Niall Roche is the content author and owner of spam-site.com.

niall@spam-site.com