by:
Niall Roche
Before we start acquiring deep into the meat of this article it's important to explain several standard nomenclature to do sure the rest of this article does 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 system 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 email to and obtain email from each other. Blacklists exclude acknowledged and suspected spammers. Whitelists can be used to exclude everyone except acknowledged IP addresses. Think of it like this. A whitelist is a like having a phonebook which is closely-held by a small group of folk who only will to speak directly to each other. They don't want simply anybody ringing them. Not only that but the entire group need to approve new phone amount before they appear in this exclusive phonebook.
To send email to a whitelist you must be sanctioned 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 cabaret bouncers of the virtual earth - if you ain't on the list you ain't acquiring in. Simple but really effective.
A real earth example of a whitelist would-be be if two companies wanted to exchange email only with each other. These companies could implement a whitelist that contained the IP address for simply the two email servers that want to send email to each other. That would-be mean that any email coming from an IP address not on the whitelist would-be be returned to sender. For companies they can ensure that employees are only dealing with activity related email and not chatting with their friends.
The benefits of whitelists are galore but proper management of the whitelists is equally important. Misuse of whitelists will only lead to much headaches for everyone involved with missing email, ireful customers and IT departments doing overtime simply being the tip of the iceberg.
If you'd like to discover much simply about spam then drop by http://www.spam-site.com today.
Just simply about the author:
This article was submitted courtesy of Spam-Site.com which reviews spam filters and besides offers proposal
on stopping spam for free.