I Want A Better Email Whitelisting Integration
Every time I register for a new online service I get a message:
Thank you for registering with example-service.com.
Please add registration@example-service.com to your whitelist page and make sure to check your bulk folder if you don’t receive the service activation email.
We have three potential problems here:
- Some people don’t know how to add an email address to a whitelist.
- One needs to copy-n-paste the email to be whitelisted, go to their email provider website, dig through the options to find the whitelisting screen and enter the email address.
- If the customer’s email service doesn’t place the spam mail in the bulk folder, but deletes it, the customer will never see the service activation email. In most cases that would mean that they won’t be able to activate their account, nor they will be able to re-register with the same email address. This is a dead-end. It exists because the whitelisting happens too late. The customer needs to whitelist the email address first and only then have example-service.com send the activation email.
Since a majority of email users use a handful of email providers, clearly this is an opportunity for someone to provide a new service that solves this problem.
This new web service routes people to the appropriate page within their webmail system to add a whitelist entry for, say, an e-commerce site they are doing business with.
In other words, the process is:
- Customer visits example-service.com and signs up for a service or or a mailing list.
- Instead of telling Customer that he should add foo@example-service.com to his whitelist, now example-service.com says, “Just click this easy link and you’ll be taken to the appropriate page at your email provider/ISP” (and even prefill the form for the customer if they are logged in)
- Customer clicks the link, which will accomplish the whitelisting process, e.g. something like:
http://gmail.com/whitelist/add?a=*@example-service.com
This could be potentially fully automated if the email provider has a provision (API) to accomplish that and if not they could probably add one if that improves their customers experience.
- Now example-service.com can send an account activation email or start sending mailing list messages, and no emails are lost.
Mission accomplished. Customers don’t break their heads trying to figure out things that are a way beyond their technical knowledge, and web services get their customer support load reduced, since registration/activation or mail receival is no longer an issue.
Any takers?
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4 Responses to “I Want A Better Email Whitelisting Integration”
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I have the answer…
Just don’t whitelist at all, ever.
Some people don’t know how to add an email address to a whitelist.
I am not sure why anyone would want an email to be added anyway.
steer clear and be free.
AJ
Why would you want to add an email to the whitelist? Because otherwise important emails that you want to receive (or worse have to receive) may never reach your INBOX.
I have a great solution for you, a whitelist instructions generator that will create the full instructions for you and then you can add this HTML page to your site.
I built a new free email instruction generator that will create user whitelist instructions for all the ISPs, mobile devices and most of the popular client side spam filters. This also includes things like Blackberries, SpamCop (used heavily by Microsoft) and more ISPs than previously included.
http://www.emaildeliveryjedi.com/email-whitelist.php
Let me know what you think. - Chris Lang
Chris, thanks for providing those instructions - those are definitely useful, I applaud you for doing that.
The problem is that most people won’t know your site exists and they won’t even think to look for one. And typically it’s too late in the game since registration email has already been sent by that time and never delivered.
Ideally there should be at least an integration of those instructions with services, which want to make sure that their users receive their email.