I don't think it needs to be centralized. Why not have a white list per account? When you sign up for a list or service you can add certain domains to you personal list.

Of course some of the larger services may offer a default white list for common domains.

So every time I type my email somewhere, I also have to go to my mail provider and pre-emptively whitelist the sender? This does not sound like a very good UX.

I suppose you can have a special system where you have a browser plugin which automatically generates some sort of subscription token and pastes it alongside email into subscription form.. but this will need cooperation from every mail-sending app, and will not handle non-web uses cases at all...

I use Hey.com which allows me to screen first time senders [1] and it works really well. This is in combination to a spam filter.

[1] https://hey.com/features/the-screener/