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Dangers of Email Whitelisting

By April 1, 2014January 17th, 2022Blog

We’ve spoken before on the topic of email whitelisting. As we mentioned in our last blog article on the subject, whitelisting is an email security process that allows emails through based on whether or not the recipient has a prior relationship with the sender. The goal of whitelists is twofold: to make sure that your most important emails are never caught by a spam filter and to make sure that malicious emails never get through. While whitelisting handles the first of these issues superbly, it’s not a surefire way to avoid malicious mail.

Why is this? Well, as we previously pointed out, phishing attempts and malicious mail can actually come from a sender that you already know. It isn’t really that difficult to manipulate an email address into sending out spam or malicious mail for you, and this process is used pretty frequently by internet ne’er do wells. You get an email from your buddy in accounting, don’t think twice about opening it and bam! Infected.

So for a person only protecting themselves with a whitelist, they are essentially leaving themselves open to attack from these types of campaigns. Think about it this way, if all it took to infiltrate an enemy barracks in wartime was a friendly uniform, being a spy would be about as difficult as putting on a t-shirt.

So if we’ve mentioned this before, why bring it up again? Well, actually there are two reasons for that. The first being that it’s very important that people realize the importance of relying on more than just a whitelist for your security needs. You need multiple tiers of protection, from IP reputation checks to classic malware scans, all combined to create a powerful blockade against cyberscum. (How cool is the word cyberscum, huh? You can have that one for free.)

The second reason we bring it up, is that we’ve just released our latest ebook, entitled, “Problems with Email Whitelisting.” Judging by the reactions we received to our first ebook, “11 Foolproof Tactics To Become an Email Ninja,” we think this one will be right up your alley.

And of course, don’t forget that nothing keeps inboxes cleaner than Sendio’s Trusted Email Communities. Our trusted email communities, combined with our multiple tiers of security mean that you get every email you want, and nothing you don’t.