Why You Can’t Block All Business/Work Emails (and What You Can Do Instead)

There isn’t a universal way to tell if an email address is “business” or “personal.” The email system doesn’t have a flag that says this is personal or this is business. For example, an address like name@gmail.com could belong to a small business owner, or someone using it for personal communication.

While it’s common to want to exclude all business email addresses, the reality is that domains like Gmail, Yahoo, and AOL are used by both personal users and businesses. Likewise, there are many private domains that are strictly personal. Because of this, there’s no technical way to guarantee that we can remove business email addresses from a mailing list.

What You Can Do: Use Whitelisting or Blacklisting

The best way to get close to your goal such as limiting mailings to personal addresses, is by filtering at the domain level:

• Whitelisting – We allow only the domains you specify (e.g., Gmail, Yahoo, AOL). Any address outside that list is automatically excluded.

• Blacklisting – We block specific domains you choose, and allow all others.

You can read more about how to set up and manage whitelisting in our guide: How to Whitelist Domains

Important Notes

Whitelisting personal-use domains is a common approach for customers who want to avoid business or corporate addresses. While it’s not foolproof because some people still use Gmail or Yahoo for business, it can meets expectations.

If you’d like to set this up, just send us the list of domains you want to use to our support team. Once configured, our system will only send to those domains and block all others. This is the closest possible way to meet the “personal only” request within the limits of how email works.

References

To learn more about the technical side of whitelisting and blacklisting, here are some resources from a few email service providers:

• Microsoft 365 – Create Safe Sender and Blocked Sender Lists in Office 365

• Gmail - Block Messages From An Email or Domain

• Microsoft 365 – Tenant Allow/Block List Overview

• Mapp – Understanding Blacklists and Whitelists