Paying to get less email

So, this Monday I began my Monday ritual. I loaded Thunderbird for the first time since Friday afternoon and pulled out a magazine to read while my connection downloaded 1800 emails at full speed. Now and then, I glanced up to watch my Mac’s beachball icon spin around merrily as Thunderbird’s spam filters went into overdrive trying to chomp and digest the vertible gastronomic feast of spam.

Roughly 4 minutes later, Thuunderbird proudly displayed 180 emails in my inbox it decided weren’t spam and moved the rest into my trash. A few minutes of mindless clicking and deleting passed while I filtered out the rest of the not-spam-but-nearly-spam emails. I then read the remaining 3 genuine emails and loaded Mozilla to start the day with the feeling that this is a stupid way to start the week.

A few of my peers at IPS towers have purchased an annual subscription to Mail Blocks to help fight the war against wasting time. This is a good service but it relies on the other party authenticating the email they sent by clicking a link in an email that Mail Blocks sends. To me, this defeats the purpose of reducing unwanted mail as for every spam email you get a validation request bounced back to the sender. Often the sender of the SPAM is unaware that their email address is being used so they end up with all the “Validated your email!” requests.
Other systems rely on you downloading the email so it can be processed on your computer. This is all very well and good, but you’re still having to download the email first and with many UK broadband providers now capping downloads, this is a time consuming and often costly exercise.
I remembered a recent article in .net magazine about a service called Email Systems that actually took your POP log in information off of you and gave you a POP account with them. They then download your mail every five minutes to their servers, process the mail, remove and store the spam elsewhere and then leave the ‘good’ email on their POP server for you to download. This, to me, seemed like an ideal situation. The only downside is that it costs £3.75 a month for every email address. However, I decided that it was worth the 12p a day to free up the time and bandwidth consumed by downloading junk email and signed up.

I’ve used the system for about 36 hours now and it’s pretty effective. It’s caught over 700 spam and virus emails since I signed up which is pretty impressive. It’s nice to actually download all my mail in a few seconds and only have a few emails to manually clear up. The system isn’t perfect and I’d like more configuation options such as a white-list, black-list and some way to manually add your own filters. It’s also a little annoying because it sends you an email to tell you it’s intercepted a virus. I can see the sense in that so you’d know that you might already have a virus, but it’d be nice to switch that off and I can’t seem to do that. The only configuration option it has is the ability to ping the IP address of the sender to ensure it came from a valid source. They do promise more options soon and they would be very welcome. Overall, it’s a great low-cost way of filtering out the junk and I no longer dread the first download of every morning.

So, I’m paying a company to read and censor my emails. Take that, you tin-hat wearing GMail hating weirdos!