E-Mail Evolves

New Spam Slammers

Everybody hates spam, as the burgeoning of the spam-blocking industry shows. The latest development: Web-based e-mail with sender verification technology.

It works like this: Sign up for a service and access all of your e-mail through its Web interface (including messages received via existing POP3 accounts). The service places e-mail from persons not on your address list in a "pending" folder while it fires off an authentication request to the sender. Spammers' automated systems can't reply, so the junk message never reaches your in-box. And individual senders need respond only once for the service to recognize them in the future.

User authentication is a promising antispam strategy, but it adds some unavoidable hurdles for legitimate senders and mailings. For instance, to subscribe to an automated newsletter, you must create a sometimes problematic alias to ensure that the newsletter gets through.

We evaluated two new Web-based e-mail services: Block All Spam and Mailblocks. Both are $10 per year, and in our tests both worked as advertised, shuttling junk mail into a pending folder while awaiting a response that never came.

When retrieving POP3 messages, Mailblocks worked well; Block All Spam's feature was not yet functioning at this writing.

Of the two, Mailblocks certainly felt more polished; we ran into frequent Web page stalls and browser crashes while using Block All Spam. The latter product does, however, offer more features, including a calendar and a task scheduler.

--Glenn McDonald