Alien Camel: Just the Email, Ma'am

After I made the first post about email annoyances, I was contacted by Alien Camel with an offer of a trial account. It’s a full email service with spam filtering, a webmail client, and IMAP access. I really like the fact that it offers remote IMAP access, as it avoids the “black hole” phenomenon of Gmail. The basic principle of the system is address whitelisting (of individual senders, mailing lists, or entire domains) and blacklisting (of individual senders or entire domains). On top of that large-pixel filter, is a finer-grained spam ranking system. Whitelisted messages flow through to your account normally, but unwhitelisted messages and potential spam messages are held on the server for you to review. This is nice, considering how much of my current inbox is spam that was cleverly spoofed as being sent much earlier than it actually was. I don’t see it to delete it until I try to work my way through older messages (in one of those “clean out the inbox” pushes).

The web interface for reviewing unwhitelisted/spam messages is well designed. You get a whole list of messages to review, with radio buttons for “whitelist this message”, “flag as junk”, “accept but don’t whitelist”, and “delete”. I can work my way down a column of messages much faster than I can work through the same number of messages in my inbox (plus, I don’t have to wait for the email client to churn through processing each message or highlighted group of messages before I go on to the next). You review 20 emails at a time by default, and the “Process” button takes you to a confirmation page that makes you click again to see the next 20 emails. This gets clunky when you’re reviewing 150+ messages at a time, you can configure it to view more than 20 emails at a time, but it’d be nice if the confirmation page also showed the next set of email messages to process, or if they had a “Process & Continue” button. The interface does give you the option of marking all remaining unwhitelisted messages as spam, and since it sorts the list from “least likely to be spam” down to “most likely to be spam”, there’s a good chance you can stop reviewing before you get to the bottom of the list. You can also configure it to automatically delete highly ranked spam messages.

They allow you to create up to 5 “disposable addresses” (<somerandomnumber>@aliencamel.com). These are aliases for your real address that aren’t spam filtered, if you hand out the address and ever get spam on it, you can just shut the address off. I was looking for a “whitelist by To address” feature. I often use unique email addresses (like “bananarepublic@mydomain.com”), so I know when an online service is handing out my email address to spammers. They said the “whitelist mailing list” feature would handle this, since To address is one of the methods it uses to identify the mailing list.

Alien Camel offers a handy option to automatically retrieve email via POP from one other account. (I’m not sure why it’s limited to one account.) This is useful, as I have a quite old POP-only account that doesn’t give me the option of forwarding to a remote email address. I have just enough important email coming in on the account that I can’t get rid of it, but it has been an annoyance for years now. When I took my initial notes for this blog post I was going to report that it didn’t work for me because the account was too ancient to support APOP, and Alien Camel required it. But, since last Friday, they added a checkbox to the remote POP configuration page that lets you turn off APOP. Was someone watching the error logs and adding new features as a result? If so, that’s great customer service.

Alien Camel isn’t a solution for my multiple domains with multiple users, but it’s likely I’ll continue using it to aggregate my scattered collection of individual email addresses. They get high marks for focusing on a core problem and solving it well. (Besides, as an old-time Perl hacker, I get a kick out of the “aliencamel.com” address.)

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