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Outlook "Safe Senders" whitelist not working

Anonymous
2023-05-05T15:34:52+00:00

I use the desktop version of Outlook as my email client, and have done so for years. Lately, many legitimate emails are being mis-flagged as junk and wind up in my spam folder. these are business colleagues and clients, and I have whitelisted their email addresses multiple times without success. To be clear, I can confirm that the addresses are listed in the whitelist, but the whitelist seems to have zero effect; their emails still wind up in Spam. I have confirmed that my Junk email settings are configured to "Low". Other emails get through to me just fine, and I cannot identify any pattern or any reason that many other emails from whitelisted "safe senders" are being flagged as spam.

Is there a way to fix this, short of creating a new Outlook profile or doing a clean reinstall of Office 365?

Outlook | Windows | Classic Outlook for Windows | For business

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  1. Anonymous
    2023-09-23T00:30:59+00:00

    I have the same problem, and found it reported multiple times in multiple places. Microsoft and other responders however, seem to ignore the actual question - the whitelist is not working properly.

    Why should we try all sorts of work-arounds? Come on MS, just fix the whitelist.

    What most of us want is for MS to allow that we might know what we're doing - when we say whitelist this email address, just whitelist it, end of story, nothing more complicated needed. And then don't put whitelisted emails in junk.

    Sounds very simple to do if MS actually wanted to do it.

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  2. Anonymous
    2023-11-15T15:14:23+00:00

    Whitelisting doesn't seem to do anything. I'd have to visit my junk everyday just for emails.

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  3. Anonymous
    2023-11-15T14:59:33+00:00

    No. I have not found a fix or workaround for this issue. I am constantly whitelisting my contacts, over and over.

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  4. Anonymous
    2023-08-10T02:43:43+00:00

    Has anyone found a solution to this yet? Both myself and my boss are having the same trouble with mail sent to us from our website. The notices I receive come from a different address to what my boss is receiving but in both instances the client side junk mail filter completely ignores the allow list if the mail comes from our website (sender address uses our own domain).

    Not as much of an issue for me as my notices aren't important but the boss is having sales leads from the website go to his junk which is terrible.

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  5. Anonymous
    2023-05-05T17:23:10+00:00

    Candy,

    Thanks for your response.

    I have probably between 50-75 email addresses in my "Safe Senders" list. But I have zero "Outlook contacts". The issue seems to be that the "Safe Senders" list is not being used by Outlook, not a problem adding contacts to the "Safe Senders" list.

    If relevant, I would add that I am not using Exchange to host emails but rather a third party IMAP host.

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