Allowlist
A list of senders explicitly approved to deliver mail without filtering — the modern, inclusive term for whitelist.
An allowlist is a list of senders, domains, or IP addresses that an email provider, recipient, or organization has explicitly approved to deliver email without filtering. Adding a sender to your allowlist is the strongest possible deliverability signal — Gmail, Outlook, and others treat allowlisted senders almost identically to manually-added contacts.
Allowlists exist at multiple layers. The recipient-level allowlist is the user's "Contacts" or "Safe Senders." The organization-level allowlist is administered by an IT or security team and bypasses corporate spam filtering. The Internet-wide allowlists (like Return Path Certification, now part of Validity) are third-party reputational programs that high-volume senders pay into.
The legacy term "whitelist" is being replaced industry-wide with "allowlist" both for clarity and to remove racial connotation. The two terms mean the same thing in email contexts.