Spam organisation launches whitelist of safe email senders

The whitelist can be used by email systems to help them to decide what email to allow users to see and what to filter out as spam.

"Only verified legitimate senders with clean reputations are approved for whitelisting and there are strict terms to keeping a whitelist account," said a Spamhaus statement. "Bulk email for marketing purposes is not allowed in any form and whitelist account holders must personally know or employ each sender that uses a whitelisted resource."

Spamhaus's blacklists contain domains that are used to send spam. The constantly-updated lists allow email systems to block messages from sources known to send spam.

This helps systems in the difficult task of automatically deciding which emails to allow a user to see and which to filter out. A danger in the filtering process is the deleting of messages as spam that are in fact legitimate. These are known as 'false positives'.

"For mail server administrators with high incoming spam levels it means you can use heavier, more in-depth filters without risking false positives from known good senders," said Spamhaus.

"Intended for mail from qualified corporations, banks, accounting firms, law firms, airlines, medical centers, government agencies, and transactional mail from automated billing systems, ecommerce servers, online banking and booking systems, the Spamhaus Whitelist is designed to enable special and priority handling by mail servers of important mail from senders who are known to be extremely unlikely to ever send spam," said the statement.

Any email marketing by such organisations will have to be sent from a different mail server from the one that is submitted for inclusion on Spamhaus's whitelist. "Mail servers used for sending any type of advertising or marketing bulk email are not eligible for whitelisting, no matter how solicited and spam-free the mailings are," said Spamhaus.

"For email recipients, the Spamhaus Whitelist means a reduction in messages marked in error as spam by scoring systems and content filters. For email senders, it means an end to important mail lost in junk folders, delayed or wrongly tagged as spam," it said.

Owners of domains that want their internet addresses to appear on the whitelist cannot yet simply apply; they must be invited by an organisation already on the whitelist during the initial 'sunrise' period of the list.

During that initial period the list is free, but once applications are more generally accepted a fee of around $250 a year will be charged, though it could rise for heavier email senders, Spamhaus said.

The Whitelist will work in conjunction with Spamhaus's blacklists and no domain can appear on both, the organisation said.

"You can not whitelist an IP address or domain that is used for sending marketing or soliciting bulk email, or used for sending any email on behalf of third parties," said Spamhaus. "This rule therefore automatically excludes (makes not eligible for whitelisting) Email Service Providers, ISP customer mail relays and mail servers used by third-parties, and all bulk mailing list servers and services."

Spamhaus said that use of the whitelist and blacklists will enable operators of email systems to concentrate their filtering and analysis on any domains that appear on neither list.

"It allows internet mail servers to separate incoming email traffic into 3 categories: Good, Bad and Unknown, allowing mail server operators to block known bad email traffic, let known good email traffic pass safely, and heavily filter unknown email sources," said Spamhaus.