How to white list senders in Fastmail (updated for 2025)

Tired of spam cluttering your Fastmail inbox? Fastmail offers robust spam filtering with customizable options to keep unwanted messages at bay. This guide shows you how to leverage Fastmail’s features to fine-tune your spam protection and keep your inbox clean.

• Using Contacts to Improve Filtering
• Customizing Spam Protection Settings
• Adding and Deleting Contacts

Using Contacts to Improve Filtering

Fastmail uses your contacts to improve filtering. Emails from senders in your contact list receive special treatment, receiving a reduced spam score. Here’s how to leverage your contacts:

• Adding Known Senders: Add frequent and trusted senders to your contact list to ensure their emails are not flagged as spam.
• Adding Entire Domains: You can whitelist entire domains by adding a contact with the email address *@domain.tld (replace domain.tld with the actual domain) in the Email field. This applies to entries in shared contact groups as well. Great for whitelisting the domain for a job or school.
• Workaround for Mailing Lists: If you don’t want to clutter contacts, create a single contact named “Whitelist” and add domains as extra addresses in the Email field.

Customizing Spam Protection Settings

Fine-tune your spam filtering in Settings → Mail rules. Locate the Spam protection section and click Advanced settings. Here’s a breakdown of the available options:

• Filtering Options: Choose between Standard, Aggressive, and Custom spam filtering.
• Standard: Sends messages with a spam score of 5 or higher to your Spam folder.
• Aggressive: Sends messages with a spam score of 4 or higher to your Spam folder and permanently deletes messages with a spam score of 10 or higher.
• Custom: Allows you to manually set spam score thresholds.

Important Note: If a legitimate message is incorrectly marked as spam, clicking Not spam will apply any existing rules to the message. If no rules apply, the message will be moved to your Inbox.

Adding and Deleting Contacts

Fastmail provides multiple ways to manage your contacts:

• Direct Addition: Add contacts via the Contacts screen by clicking New contact and entering details.
• Adding via Email Composition: When composing an email, Fastmail suggests contacts based on what you type.
• Adding from Within an Email: View a message, click Show details, and click the sender’s email address. In the menu that opens, click Add to contacts.
• Other Actions: The drop down menu provides options such as copy the address to your clipboard, copy the name and address, compose a message to them, invite them to an event, and search your mail for correspondence with that address. These actions can also be done from the People tab of the sidebar.

Using these tips, take control of your Fastmail inbox and keep the spammers away!

Photo by Philipp Katzenberger on Unsplash