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Mailblocks: Spam Killer

I’ve been using Mailblocks for about a month now, and overall I have been very pleased with the service.

I originally saw an advertisement for ChoiceMail on a photoshop forum that I visit often, and liked the looks of it. However, ChoiceMail is a program that runs on your computer and filters the email before it is received in your Outlook mailbox, so it can only be used on one computer. Several weeks after that I came across Mailblocks, which is a web-based service that is nearly identical to ChoiceMail. Because it is web-based, I can access it from home, work, a friend’s house, the library, an internet cafe’, etc., and it will work everywhere. With ChoiceMail if I checked my mail from another location, I would see all of my spam. Only when I checked it from the comptuer I had the program installed on, would it filter the spam.

Mailblocks is based on a filter system called “challenge/response technology” which basically means you can’t send me email without my permission. Though it may sound harsh and unfriendly at first, it really isn’t. There are several ways to make sure only the spammers are being “challenged” by the filtering system, so that your friends, family and co-workers will not be hassled by the spam blocker.

First of all, you can import your address book from other email programs and services like Hotmail or Outlook, which pre-approves all of your current contacts so they won’t even know you are using the Mailblocks service.

You can also add people to your Mailblocks address book manually, which pre-approves them as well.

When you send an email to someone not already in your address book, they are added to your list of approved senders, so that when they reply to you, they will not be hassled with the spam blocker.

So what happens if someone writes you an email out of the blue and they haven’t been pre-approved in your address book?

If an email is sent to your Mailblocks email address that wasn’t sent by someone on your approved sender’s list, Mailblocks immediately sends the person an email letting them know that you are using the Mailblocks service to stop spam, and that their email has been put into a pending folder until they verify themselves. Included in that email is a link which they can then click on, and they are then taken to a page on the Mailblocks server that has an image of a seven digit number on it. Below the image of the number is a form field where they type the number that they see in the image. It takes about 5 seconds to do, and they will never have to enter that number again, as long as they use the same email address to send messages to you in the future.

The reason this works is that most spammers send out millions of emails at a time, and if they get a message like this back, they will not take the time to approve themselves so they can continue to send you spam. Also if they are using special software to do the spamming, the software will not be able to see the numbers that are in the image on the approval page, so it will not be able to fill out the form field to approve itself.

If an email is blocked, it is moved into a pending folder for two weeks. If at the end of two weeks the sender has not approved themselves by entering the seven digit number on the approval page, the email will be permanently deleted.

You can look through the pending folder at any time to see if there is an email that you wanted to save that got blocked for some reason. When you move the email out of the pending folder and into the Inbox, that sender is automatically approved, and all future emails from that person will be sent to your inbox automatically.

If you subscribe to mailing lists or would like to get a newsletter or receipt from an e-commerce web site, you can set up what Mailblocks calls a “Tracker”. Basically this is a special email address that pre-approves anything that is sent to it. For instance, you could have one address that you use to subscribe to newsletters with. It would be something like this:

jdoe-newsletters8373@mailblocks.com

It takes your username (jdoe) plus a unique word to identify the address (newsletters) plus a four digit pin number (8373) to create the address. Then when the newsletters are sent to you, they automatically show up in your inbox. If the newsletter owner starts spamming you, you can simply delete that particular Tracker, and set up a new one. Then all that spam that was coming to that address will start bouncing back, and you won’t be bothered with it.

The cost of the service is $9.95 a year, but they are having a special right now so that you get 3 years of service for $9.95. That’s less than $.28 a month, and it’s definitely worth it.

That’s the basics of the service, and it has worked very well for me. So far Mailblocks has blocked over 1,300 spam emails, in under 1 month of use.

There are a couple of problems with the service however, but they are technical web site issues more than problems with the service itself.

For one thing, I have several domains with email accounts, and I want people to see my address as xxxxx@soktdesign.com or xxxxx@onethreeone.com, not xxxxx@mailblocks.com. I have setup forwarders so that all emails sent to xxxxx@soktdesign.com go to my mailblocks address, and that works fine. However, Mailblocks does not currently let you set the “reply-to” value of each email, so when people get an email from me it shows my address as xxxxx@mailblocks.com instead of xxxxxx@soktdesign.com. I have emailed Mailblocks about this, and they said that this feature will be added to their next update, which should be sometime in July. When they do that, the Mailblocks service will be completely transparent unless someone sends you an email that has not been approved.

Another problem is that you don’t know how much unread mail is in a folder without clicking on it. Most email services and programs do something like this:

Inbox (12)
Friends (3)
Work (15)
Misc. (24)

To show you how many unread emails are in each folder. Mailblocks doesn’t have this feature, but again, they said they will be adding it to the next upgrade.

Customer service responded quickly when I wrote to them, and it’s nice to see that they are listening to their customers and adding the features that they request.

Overall I’m very pleased with Mailblocks, and I would encourage everyone to take a look at the service for themselves and see if it would work for them. I know I am happy to pay $.28 a month to receive ZERO spam.

Disclaimer: I do not work for Mailblocks and was not paid to write this article. I’m just a pleased customer that hates spam, and am hoping I can help someone else kill spam by posting this

hey man sounds fucking awesome to me…thats a lot of blocked emails in a month. I think that when I get a computer at home I will definitely use mailblocks…with my apple G5.

hey derek,
would love to talk to you about your Mailblocks experience. Can I contact you offline?
thanks,
Tonie

I’ve been getting heaps more spam lately, too. Someone recommended Spam Inspector to me. I have been using it for a few days now and it is amazingly effective so far:
http://www.spaminspector.com