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Aliencamel - Spam Filtering and Email Account Service

About.com Rating 4.5
User Rating2.0 out of 5 (1 Review)  Write a Review

By , About.com Guide

Aliencamel

Aliencamel

Heinz Tschabitscher
The Bottom Line
Aliencamel renders your email practically spam-free, scans for viruses and offers unlimited online storage. With Aliencamel, you do not have to download and barely have to deal with all the junk mail while false positives are minimized, thanks to Bayesian filtering and many smart approaches built into Aliencamel's system with admirable attention to details.
Pros
  • Aliencamel is highly effective against spam with one of the most simple yet smartest approaches
  • Ranking by spaminess and disposable addresses can practically rule out false positives
  • Aliencamel offers unlimited online storage and web-based as well as IMAP and POP access
Cons
  • Aliencamel fetches mail only from one existing email account
  • Spam sent from a whitelisted address gets through
  • Aliencamel offers only five disposable email addresses
Description
  • Aliencamel is an email service that provides accounts filtered for spam and viruses.
  • Aliencamel can retrieve and filter mail from an existing (POP) account periodically.
  • Only mail from authorized senders is allowed through to your Inbox.
  • Messages from new senders are put in a "Pending" folder, and you get a summary of this pending mail.
  • Using scoring and Bayesian filtering, Aliencamel suggests what to do with pending messages.
  • Aliencamel not only backs up all mail, you also get emergency access through a separate data center.
  • You can whitelist single addresses, domains and mailing lists, and import your email address book.
  • Mail from known senders can be filtered to folders automatically by Aliencamel.
  • Aliencamel lets you create up to five disposable email address aliases.
  • Aliencamel is accessible via POP, IMAP and the web.
Guide Review - Aliencamel - Spam Filtering and Email Account Service
Would you like an alien camel to drink your desperately needed water? Spam is a lot like this alien camel, and Aliencamel employs simple yet very elegant and highly effective measures to ban it.

Only mail from authorized senders is allowed to your Aliencamel Inbox. So far, so well-known. But Aliencamel is no service that forces new senders to authorize by responding to what is often only too aptly named "a challenge". You can and have to whitelist them all yourself.

Isn't this a lot of work, and don't you have to go through all the spam anyway? No, because Aliencamel filtering to suggest what to do with pending mail. Thanks to scoring and personally trained Bayesian statistics, the suggestions are surprisingly good.

Comprehensive virus scanning comes as an additional bonus, and Aliencamel allows you to create up to five disposable addresses. Mail to these addresses always gets through (useful for Bccing yourself without having to whitelist yourself, for example), but it's easy to disable a disposable address if it gets in the hands of spammers.

Aliencamel IMAP access is a joy to use and recommended, but POP is also available, and you can always check your Aliencamel account via the web-based interface.

There's also a special kick to using Aliencamel: you get unlimited storage for truly all the emails you want to keep.

Though the web interface and searching archived mail could improve, it is difficult to praise this once-and-for all email account too much.

2 out of 5 2 out of 5
Aliencamel thoughts!September 29, 2009By robtpatrick
"I read About.com's review and a couple of others. I signed up, configured my EMail client(this was done easily) The service for some reason did not put 9 mssages in the ""pending folder"") This was detected by another spam service I use. The srvice also did not catch a ""phishing EMail"" which I deleted. Lastly you must open a Paypal account to use Aliencamel; I wrote to them twice to ask that they use an alternative; this was denied by Aliencamel. The 9 messages were correctly picked up by 0Spam com. Kudos to 0Spam! for picking up what Aliencamel missed!"
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