Spam Hound automatically builds and maintains whitelists.

Whitelists are lists of people or subject lines of an email that indicate the email is pre-approved.

Because most people communicate with a number of different people on a regular basis, an important part of a spam filter is allowing you to indicate that certain senders are pre-approved and others you never want to hear from.

When installed Spam Hound automatically scans your address books as well as your "sent items" folder and extracts the addresses of people you have corresponded with in the past. These people are whitelisted.
In addition to this, every time you send an email Spam Hound will automatically white list both the person you sent the email to as well as the subject line and other information about the email.
As a result you are assured that Spam Hound will not block any response to your email no matter how spammy the response may look.
This means that the longer you use Spam Hound, the better it gets at detecting spam.

In addition to whitelists Top Dog also keeps a list of people who's email you want to block.
If any spam makes it through Spam Hound with a single click you can categorize the email as spam.
Categorizing an email as spam adds the sender to your personal blacklist and trains Spam Hound's Neural Network to detect similar spam in the future even if sent using a different address.

You can always view and edit your whitelists within Spam Hound.

How it Works

• Upon install, Spam Hound scans your "sent items" folder and extracts the email addresses of the people you have sent mail to.
• While running Spam Hound regularly scans your address book and automatically whitelists the people in it.
• Every time you send an email to someone Spam Hound automatically whitelists their address.
• Every time you receive an email from a whitelisted person Spam Hound automatically whitelists the other recipients.
• Every time you send an email Spam Hound automatically whitelists the subject line. This way if a different person replies to your email the reply will still get through.
• Spam Hound automatically whitelists any email that is in reply to or refers to an email you have sent.
• Whenever you categorize an email as personal the sender is automatically whitelisted.
• If you receive an email via a mailing list that is whitelisted the sender of the email is automatically whitelisted.
  

Blacklists

Blacklists are lists of people or other features of an email that indicate the email is unwanted (i.e. Always considered spam).
Spam Hound also automatically maintains a blacklist of people who's email you always want to reject.
Whenever you categorize an email as spam the sender is automatically added to your blacklist.
After that, anytime that sender tries to send you an email it is automatically flagged as spam.

When you blacklist or whitelist a sender that previously belonged to a different list Spam Hound automatically removes the entry from the previous list.
For example, if you had accidentally whitelisted a sender and you then categorize an email from them as spam.
Spam Hound will remove the sender from your whitelist and add it to your blacklist.