Adding Five Links to Your Whitelist

Help us help you

We have received some feedback from Subscribers that they stopped receiving Five Links after the first or second issue. This makes us sad, because we work hard on picking five interesting links and we want you to enjoy them.

The problem is likely to due to spam filters treating our newsletter as spam.

Below is how to fix it.

What is a Whitelist?

Most email apps now include some base spam filtering as standard. And that’s great - because it keeps the annoying emails out!

The problem is though if the app thinks an email is spam it will hide it without ever checking if you want to see it. You probably don’t wan’t to see emails about appendage-enhancing-pills or overseas lottery winnings .. but you might be missing out on other good stuff!

To deal with this, email apps offer you something called a ‘whitelist’ — and yes it’s simply the opposite of a ‘blacklist’. That is, instead of you having to add email addresses to a blacklist to keep them out, the app filters everything as it comes in and leaves you to add email addresses to a whitelist to allow them in.

How to add Five Links to your Whitelist

There are two ways to get Five Links onto your email app’s whitelist.

The first and easiest way is to pre-emptively approve us before you’ve received your first issue.

To do this, simply add Five Links to your contacts. Add a new contact named ‘Bennett @ Five Links’ with the email address ‘fivelinks@substack.com’. This is the email address each issue gets sent from. So when the next issue gets sent, your email app will think ‘oh here’s that newsletter with those awesome five links - right this way sir to the top of the inbox’. Easy.

The second way is to go through your spam folder and identify Five Links as ‘not spam’. To do this:

• using the GMail Web App — click the ‘Not Spam’ button next to the ‘delete forever’ button (very bad) on the top of our email

• using the GMail Mobile App — tap on the 3 grey dots in the top right corner of our email and select ‘Move to’ and then select ‘Primary’

• using the Apple Mobile App: Tap on the email address near the top of the email and select ‘Add to VIP’

• using Outlook Desktop App — in the ‘Junk Email’ folder, right click on the email, select ‘Junk’ and then select ‘Never Block Sender’s Domain’

Are you using an email client not listed above? Let us know and we can walk you through how to whitelist us.