T1B

I am on several mailing lists for music PR firms. Gmail has apparently decided that many of these emails are spam. I've done a cursory search of Gmail settings and help, but I can't seem to find any way to "protect" a specific sender. I have added them to my contacts list, but the majority of their emails are still routed to my spam folder. I was hoping that if I went into my spam folder, opened them all and marked them as not spam, Gmail would "learn" that they're not spam, but that didn't work either. Any suggestions?

To be truthful, I've never had gmail take a regular email from contacts and put it into spam. You must have some very dumb conversations with your friends, or you just have dumb friends. You do know that that prince from africa asking for your bank account is not real right?

Anyway, you can create a filter (under your gmail settings) for a domain or for friends and check the "never send it to spam" setting. You can also apply labels, set it as an important convo, etc...
You can also add multiple people to the same filter so you can have a single whilelist filter that has multiple people in it.

Like I said, they're from music publicists, so Gmail probably recognizes that they're bulk emails and routes them to spam. Thanks for the help. I would've never stumbled across that otherwise. While it only took me about 20 seconds after following your advice, I'm surprised it was even that complicated. Google is usually a little more intuitive and user-friendly than that...