Whitelisting Addresses in Gmail
Posted on October 26th, 2006
Gmail allows you filter incoming messages, but it only gives you a couple options on what actions can be taken: Archive, Star, Label, Forward, or Delete. There's no "Whitelist" or "Don't Flag as Spam" option. Which is naturally what I was looking for.
Whitelisting can reduce the chances of false positives-- legitimate messages that incorrectly end up in your Spam folder because Gmail took them the wrong way for one reason or another.
Whitelisting is possible with Gmail, just not in correlation with filters. I didn't realize that messages sent from addresses in your Contacts list were automatically safeguarded; even better, it seems that wildcarding is accepted and can allow you to whitelist an entire domain instead of an individual address.
Features like these are easily missed when you take advantage of Gmail's POP service and do all your writing and responding with another email client.
What about importing addresses into your Gmail Contacts list? AddressBookToCSV worked well for me. It's a script that turns the content of your OS X Address Book into a CSV file that Gmail can import. Only name and email address make it through however.