(Ted Harding) wrote:
"To ensure these emails reach your inbox please add <sender> to your address book."
Ehhh?? If an email is delivered to me, it is delivered to my inbox. Punkt. So what's behind such a statement?
And are people to whom such a thing might apply supposed to have all possible senders listed in their adress books (otherwise they may not have emails delivered)????
Indeed, it's about whitelisting - email Spam filtering software like Postini (and probably most of the webmail services like GMail and whatever Hotmail is now known as) may flag an email from sender "x" as Spam (erroneously or otherwise) and junk it, however you can generally configure a whitelist of addresses which they will simply ignore (for filtering purposes) and pass straight through. Both this and blacklisting (for example binning email on receipt on the basis of RBL/Real-time black hole headers) are of course fraught with issues and, as you imply, you would ideally have to add every address you expect to deal with in order for it to be 100% foolproof.
Thus it's common for commercial entities to remind people who have such an email set-up to include their address in one's whitelist so that their "important messages" make it through.
Simon