What is whitelisting? 

Many email clients have built-in tools to filter out unwanted spam emails. However, the methods of detecting spam are not perfect, meaning that sometimes emails you actually want to see are flagged and blocked.  

Whitelisting is the way to prevent this from happening by marking a specific email sender as safe to receive messages from. Each of the major email clients has a different way to set this up. 

Why is it important that you whitelist our emails? 

Teachable sends emails from time to time alerting you about activity on your school, new features, and occasional offers or exclusive guides. We won't fill up your inbox every day, but when we do send out an announcement or free content, you don't want to miss it. Plus, course creators don't want to miss notifications about enrollments, bounced payments, and so on. 

How to whitelist our emails on various email clients. 

We'll be going over Gmail, Apple Mail, Yahoo! Mail, Outlook, and Outlook.com, so just scroll down to the one you use. If you're on another email client, simply Google its name + "whitelisting" and you should find instructions. 

Gmail 

The Gmail inbox is split into three tabs: Primary, Social, and Promotions. If you're like most people, you tend to check Primary and ignore the others. However, if you want emails from a certain sender to go directly to your primary inbox, there's an easy two-step process to ensure that.  

1. Navigate to the Promotions tab or wherever the Teachable email is being categorized. Drag and drop the Teachable email into the Primary tab.

2. An alert will appear at the top of your inbox asking whether to do this for future emails from Teachable. Simply click "Yes" and future Teachable messages will go to your primary inbox, where they will be easily visible.

Apple Mail 

With Apple Mail (both the OSX and mobile versions), you can whitelist a sender by adding them to your contacts. 

Instead of doing this manually, you can wait until you receive an email from Teachable, then right-click on the sender address and click "Add to Contacts":

Once a sender is in your contacts, their emails won't get flagged in the future. 

Yahoo! Mail 

Adding contacts is also the way to whitelist in Yahoo! Mail. 

To do so, open an email from Teachable and click the + symbol next to the sender name. Selecting this will trigger an "Add to contacts" pop-up; simply click Save and you're done.

Outlook 

With the Outlook program, you can add @teachable.com to your contact list. 

To do so, open an email from Teachable and click on the sender name, then click on the name tag icon, this will trigger a pop-up, simply click Save and you're done.

This will ensure that communications from Teachable staff won't be sorted into your junk folder. 

Outlook.com 

The browser-based version of Outlook, Outlook.com (also known as Hotmail) is slightly different in appearance and function than the program. 

To do so, open an email from Teachable and click on the sender name, then click on the “...” button, and select "Add to contacts". This will trigger a pop-up, simply click Save and you're done.

If you often set up email campaigns or contact students directly, you might want to let them know how to whitelist your address as well. Better than the frustration of missing an important communication!