How to make sure you receive the emails you want

Our email programmes work hard to protect us from spam and junk email and worse, but often they also stop us from getting the emails we want.

And of course we are keen you can receive our emails too! So hopefully this information will help you manage things to ensure you get the emails you want.

In general, we need to add the email address we want to receive emails from on to some sort of safe sender list, or address book or contacts list or similar. This will usually require you to log in to your email provider and either add the sender to your contacts or create a specific filter in the settings. Many services also allow you to right-click an email or an address and choose an option like "Never block sender" or "Add to safe senders" to quickly whitelist it. 

And if you need a bit more support, we've added in a bit more detail (and a few helpful YouTube links as well) on how you can do this on the more popular email programmes.

• From an email: Right-click an email, select "Junk," and choose "Never Block Sender".

• Through settings: Click the gear icon, then View all Outlook settings > Mail > Junk email. Under "Safe senders and domains," click Add and enter the email address or domain, then click Save. 

• You can watch this video linked here to learn how to add an email to the safe sender list in Outlook

• From an email: Open an email, click the three-dot "More" menu in the top-right, and select "Add sender to Contacts list".

• Through settings: Go to Settings > See all settings > Filters and Blocked Addresses tab. Click Create a new filter, enter the sender's email address in the "From" field, and then in the next window, select "Never send it to Spam" before clicking "Create filter". 

• This video shows how to add an email to a safe sender list in Gmail

• From an email: Open the email and tap the "From" email address. Then tap "Create New Contact" to save it to your address book.

• Through settings: Open the main Contacts app, click "New Contact," and enter the email address there. 

• To watch a video on how you can do this on your iphone or icloud account, click here

• From an email: Open an email, click the three-dot menu next to "Spam," and select "Add Sender to Contacts".

• Through settings: Click the gear icon, go to More Settings > Filters, click Add new filters, enter the email address in the "From" field, and choose "Inbox" as the destination folder. Click Save. 

• To watch a video on how do whitelist an email in Yahoo Mail, please click here