How to Whitelist an Email Address or Domain in Gmail

Google's Gmail is great right? And you always get your legitate email messages sent to your inbox, and receive no spam right?  Well, I'd like to think that was the case, but unfortunately Google runs a tight spam filter that will occassionally put emails in your spam folder that should in fact be sent to your Inbox.  I've run into this problem with Gmail over the past year or two, but it wasn't until this week that I finally decided to Whitelist certain email addresses that Gmail has marked as spam more times than it should have.  Here's how to go about white listing email addresses or entire domains in Gmail so they are never marked as spam and sent to the spam folder:

1. Log into your Gmail account via the web.
2. Click on the Settings link.
3. Click on the Filters tab.
4. Click on Create a new filter
5. In the From: text box, type the email address that you would like to whitelist from Gmail's spam filter.  To whitelist an entire domain, simply type the domain name with the @ sign. For example type: "@mydomain.com" without the quotes.
6. To include more than one email address in the same filter, simply seperate each email addres with '|' in the From: text box. So in order to whitelist two email addresses with the filter, just type: "ben@example.com|todd@example.com"  without quotes.
7. Now click on the Next Step button. (You may first want to test the email address search criteria by clicking on the Test Search button).
8. Now check the "Never sent it to Spam" checkbox, and click Create Filter button.
9. That's it!

Often times the email addresses Gmail marks as spam come from a free personal Yahoo account (@yahoo.com), Microsoft Live account(@live.com), or a bulk newsletter that you may be signed up for.  Since spammers often use the free email accounts from Yahoo, they are big target for Gmails spam filters, especially if the emails sent have attachments.