6 Quick Steps to Whitelist cPanel eMail Accounts

This week I experienced some frustration attempting to communicate with and help a person with WordPress website troubles.

It was happening to both of us! All our emails were going into each other’s junk folders.

You may ask, “Why might random email accounts get slammed for being “junk” email?”

Most likely it is not personal when you are on a shared server. There must have been somebody else using their email account on that server for “spam” kinds of email. Therefore, you are lumped into the same classification and many of your emails land in the Junk folder.

I don’t usually check the junk folder on my Gmail account, as things seem to land where they are supposed to. The case is different on the accounts hosted on a shared server and that of a client’s. Both are cPanel accounts.

When that happens, it means you could be missing important messages and it can be deeply frustrating! This is what happened to both of us today.

Cyber issues are high right now, and that may be a reason why we need to whitelist important email addresses again. It’s also a good practice.

“If you expect to receive important emails from a trusted email address it is worth whitelisting the address to make sure that emails won’t be accidentally blocked by an overzealous email client.“
Downtime Monkey

How to Whitelist emails

Here are 6 steps to a quick fix just in case you might experience the same thing. This works if you are using a cPanel webmail email account!

When hosting your own webmail on cPanel like Robocube, Horde, and Squirrel mail, the spam filter is usually managed by Apache SpamAssassin or another like them. There is no Whitelisting option in each individual account.

1. Log into your cPanel account through your hosting service.
2. Scroll down to the Email section and select the Spam Filters Folder

1. Click on Spam Assassin. Click to make sure it is set to operating.
   (If it is not, it is letting all the spam through already so you wouldn’t need to whitelist anything.)
2. Scroll to the section for additional configurations and list the email addresses one by one to whitelist.

1. Click to save this information.
   You can always come back and do more not that you know how!
   
2. Need to whitelist an entire domain?
    cPanel spam filters allow the use of the wildcards: * and ?
   * can be used to represent any string of multiple characters
   ? to represent any single character.
   I.E. Instead of adding Terry@terryloving.com, add *@terryloving.com it will whitelist every email address belonging to the terryloving.com domain.

If you need assistance troubleshooting emails going into a junk folder, let me know! I would be happy to help.

Terry