What is whitelist and blacklist data?

Question

I was reading about development of XPCOM component. I came across these terms called whitelist data and blacklist data, I tried to find out on google but couldn\'t .. I do not

Answer 1

I don't know how it pertains to your XPCOM component, but in general terms:

• A whitelist is a list of things that you know are good
• A blacklist is a list of things you know are bad.

A spam filter would be a good example - you have a whitelist of people you're willing to receive email from without checking for spam, and a blacklist of known spammers whose emails get automatically deleted. Emails from anyone not on either list might be examined using a Bayesian filter (or similar) to determine whether they look like spam or not.