Mailblocks Anti Spam

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As with webmail you are usually custom to spam. Most big email providers sell out your email addresses and/or spammers farm them with techniques from search robots to random emailing. A lot of the big providers have anti-spam filters and they don't always work. So what's so special about this provider? You won't get any spam period in your inbox ever if you choose not to. The guys over at MailBlocks are all about anti-spam.

To get to the point, their biggest anti-spam filter will keep 100% computer generated spam out of your box, which I've never had anything that wasn't. What happens is when someone emails your mailblocks address (or anything it checks) a form is created and auto-replied to the sender. When they receive it they must fill it out (its not much of a hassle) and pretty much just verify that they are human. They call this the "Challange/Response" method. Pretty much its just an image with random numbers and letters that they must input. You can see how it works here. That doesn't mean that they have to fill it out everytime, they just need to fill it out once per email.

Does this mean that you can't get your password to some new game you signed up for, because the computer generated email won't fill out the form? Of course you can. MailBlocks does have a whitelist. All of your spam or your emails on hold to fill out the form are put into your "Pending" folder. All you have to do is look in it and find the email you want and either drag and drop it into your Inbox, or just tell it to send it there. Then that email is automatically "White Listed" so they'd never have to fill out the form again. Also spam that has been blacklisted by the site from multiple users will not even reach your Pending folder, its just deleted on arrival.

The Pending folder does not count against your email space. All email in your Pending folder has 4 to 14 days (you can choose 4, 8, or 14 days) before its deleted and blocked.

Also another option is Manual Blocking where you can set up filters and such for rejecting emails and accepting emails.

Also another handy tool are Trackers. Basically its another email address that you can make that's linked right into the one you have now and it bypasses all anti-spam for it. You can do cool things like sign up for that cool site's newsletter and make the Tracker: myemail-coolsitename@mailblocks.com. That way you can also see if they are selling your email to other places. Just try not to get sue happy if their privacy statement says that they don't sell your email addresses out and you get spam on your tracker, because you'd need more proof than just that. What's also cool is that you can just remove a Tracker too, so when you do, nothing sent to that tracker gets to you anymore. You can read more about it here.

Well what about if you have a huge address book that you want to keep and its just too much hassle to move it? Well MailBlocks will import address books from CSV (comma seperated), OutLook (exported to CSV first), and most Webmail address books. What if you have (Enter E-mail Client here) then? Well most will export your address books to CSV, just like OutLook! You can read more about that here. But you are on a Mac and nobody ever cares about you guys? Well MailBlocks actually has made some AppleScripts to export your Mac AddressBook to CSV, they even made one for Microsoft Entourage X! You can read about that here.

What about having a hotmail address, because most webmail providers can't check it? Well MailBlocks can. It has a specifically set up account checker for it if you want it to check your Hotmail. It'll even ignore and/or delete your Spam/JunkMail folder on that account for you! And what else? It even checks AOL e-mail.

But you hate webmail interfaces and use an e-mail client instead? That's fine too you can check your mail using a standard POP3/SMTP client.

So this is expensive and we know Neowinians are cheap or want free everything. Well its not expensive and there is of course a Free Version that's ad supported.

Now the basic price rundown. To see all the features and how much you get with each just go here:

Free Ad Version - 5 MB space/6 MB attachments. Just webbased interface supported, no e-mail clients.

Basic Version - $9.95 USD/YEAR 15 MB space/6 MB attachments.

Premium Version - $24.95 USD/YEAR 100 MB space/6 MB attachments.

There is more, but I'm sure that what I've said here addresses most people's concerns and if they still don't want to try it out, than they won't.

MailBlocks has more features, such as other emails than "mailblocks.com" and such, but I'm sure if you are interested you'll check it out. I love mailblocks and have been using it for almost a year I believe. I never have gotten spam in my inbox and it says its killed almost 2,000 spam emails for me so far. I use the basic version, and I don't need much else. If I needed more space, I'd just use an email client to download my mail, although you really can't beat the prices. For it to be so cheap MailBlocks really does give you a lot. Also as far as I know, most companies out there that run webmail services usually give you 1/2 MB attachment limits, the biggest I've ever seen was a 5 MB limit, which MailBlocks gives you a 6 MB limit.

All and all I recommend it. I haven't had anything negative yet about it, except that you must check your Pending folder sometimes, because if you use Challange/Response, a lot of people just don't care to fill it out.