14 DAY TRIAL // The Spamhaus Project, one of the leading anti-spam organizations in the world, has launched a whitelisting service, which aims at creating a database of IPs and domains exempted from filtering.
In combination with the outfit's already existent blacklists, the new service allows email to be categorized as good, bad or unknown.
This means that email traffic from trusted sources, such as government agencies, financial organizations, medical institutions, law firms, airlines or corporations can be allowed to reach mailboxes without being subjected to anti-spam filters.
"For email recipients, the Spamhaus Whitelist heralds an end to many messages wrongly marked as spam by scoring systems, content filters, local "blacklists" or poor filtering choices.
"For email senders, it will mean a large reduction to important mail being delayed, lost in junk folders or wrongly classified as spam," the organization explains in a press release.
In time, as the IP-based Spamhaus Whitelist (SWL) grows, mail server administrators might also become more comfortable with increasing the aggressiveness of anti-spam filtering, knowing that critical emails are protected.
Meanwhile, the Domain-based Whitelist (DWL) will contain domains certificated with DKIM (DomainKeys Identified Mail) signatures.
Spamhaus warns that a whitelist account comes with very strict terms and can be easily revoked at any time if the account holder violates them. For example, no bulk emails, of any kind, are allowed from a whitelisted server.
At the moment the service is in public beta, meaning that account applications are invite-only. An entity who wants to apply can ask a party that is already whitelisted for an invitation.
The beta period will end in December, at which time applications will be opened, but not for just anyone.
"[…] Whitelist account holders must personally know or employ each sender that uses a whitelisted resource. This means that servers of ESPs and ISPs are not elegible for whitelisting," the organization explains.