The Bottom Line
Affini is no longer available.
Pros
- Affini filters out spam by demanding senders not manually authorized to pay per message
- Removing unapproved mail from POP accounts, Affini works with most existing email addresses
- Affini members can choose the amount asked for access to their mailbox
Cons
- Affini does not stop spam sent using authorized addresses
- The process of asking, collecting and paying for access to an Affini address is a bit tedious
Description
- Affini protects email addresses by allowing only authorized or paying senders through.
- The Affini butler can periodically visit any POP account, cleaning it from spam.
- If a new sender mails an Affini member, they are asked to join the network.
- Once an Affini member, too, the sender sees how much the recipient asks for to receive the mail.
- If the sender pays, the message is delivered to the Affini member.
- The recipient can decide to collect the payment or authorize and thereby refund the sender.
- If the recipient does nothing, Affini keeps the payment.
- Senders and domains can also be authorized manually.
- The Affini trusted network lets you connect with other members that share your interests.
- You can also get commercial emails matching your interests by paying senders.
Guide Review - Affini - Spam Filtering Service
Due to spam, viruses and phishing attempts, neither do we give out our email addresses nor can we have hope in our messages to be delivered. This is what the makers of Affini had in mind, too, and they have created an email authorization and payment service that is to tackle both problems by re-establishing trust.
If you mail an Affini member (since Affini can clean any POP account, it works with most existing email addresses), you get back an invitation to join the network. After doing so, you can pay with points/cash to get your message delivered.
Now, the recipient can either authorize your email address, in which case you get your payment back or collect the amount you paid. To discourage spam even more, Affini members can choose how much they ask for per message.
Unfortunately, all this asking, paying and collecting is tedious work (especially if you want to mail more than one Affini member). Fortunately, any email address or domain can also be authorized manually by the recipient.
If that means you go through the blocked mail (mostly spam) looking for messages you want to receive, not much is gained by using Affini, though.
On the other hand, while you can report the forgery if somebody uses your email address to spam another Affini member (who you are not authorized with), once an email address is whitelisted, anything carrying its name gets through.
