Mailblocks v.s. AOL Mail

About a year ago I logged in to check my email only to discover that AOL had purchased Mailblocks - the company I used for my email. I was deeply disappointed, since I absolutely loved Mailblocks and didn't care for AOL one bit. Also, AOL has a pretty bad track record when it comes to purchasing companies - Netscape and Time Warner were both purchased by AOL to their detriment.

Let me back up some, to explain why I'm such an avid Mailblocks user. My email address is simply thomas@<some_domain>.com. When I chose this address, I was trying to pick something easy for friends and family to remember, and it was before spammers were in full swing. But a few years later I was receiving hundreds of spam messages a day, and one reason for this was because the programs that generate spam try thousands of common names (like Thomas) @ whatever domain they're spamming. So I was in a bad spot; not only did everybody I know have my email address, but the address I had chosen got just about every spam message ever sent (and most messages 10 times over).

What was I to do? I discussed solutions with my friend Rich, who was also suffering the annoyance of spam and the real problems associated with trying to filter it all. After mulling over silly things like taxing each mail message sent over the internet or overblown technical solutions, we settled on something simple and proven - challenge/response.

Challenge/response is used commonly on the internet, and even if you don't know what I'm referring to when I mention it, you've probably encountered it. Basically, if it's the first time you've ever sent email to someone, you first receive a challenge that you must respond to before your email can be delivered. After you successfully do this, you are normally added to a whitelist so you never have to answer a challenge again. The Mailblocks challenge consists of viewing an image of a number and typing in the number on a web page. It's a quick process, and less of an obstacle than it might sound like at first. Because automated programs aren't very good at reading images, the response must be handled manually, and it is therefore not worth the time of most spammers to try and answer these challenges. So with this protection in place, I've blissfully seen almost NO spam for 2 years.

My challenge notice (the email you and spammers will get if they try to email me for the first time) looks like this, by the way:

Hi,

You just sent email to me, but since I don't have you on my "whitelist" you were identified as a spammer. To prove you are not a spammer, please click the link and follow the instructions and your email will then be delivered.

You will also be added to my whitelist, so you won't have to to this again in the future. Thanks!

Thomas


So imagine my terror when I looked on Mailblocks and realized that over the past 2 years, Mailblocks has - as of this writing - prevented me from seeing 74,469 spam messages. I say terror because the Mailblocks I have come to love is probably living on borrowed time due to AOL's new management. So I decided to see what the newly purchased Mailblocks team has been working on for AOL for the past year. Maybe, just maybe, I might be able to use the AOL solution if it's enough like Mailblocks. Or so I thought. Here's what I found.

The Good:

• AOL used to get criticized mightily for their poor spam filtering. The Mailblocks addition has beefed that up substantially with new spam control options.
  
  
• The AOL interface is very pretty and functional. It's strikingly close to the old Mailblocks interface. The interface supports rich gestures such as drag and drop for organizing mail that work nicely.
  
  
• Like Gmail, they give you 2 gigs of storage space. This is a huge improvement over what Mailblocks lets you store (their best offering is 100 megs - which is so 2004...)
  
  
• They've added virus protection to the email service, which is a good thing.
  

The Bad:

• Well first off, it's unbelievably hard if not impossible to learn about the AOL mail solution. After poking around forever on aol.com, I somehow ended up at aim.com, which is where their free email service is. From there you have to sign up and try it out to see what you're getting - there are no generally available explanations of features or screenshots that I could find anywhere.
  
  
• Right up front - challenge/response is gone. That's right, the single biggest reason to use Mailblocks is kaput. The closest thing to it is a strict whitelist/blacklist approach, but this misses the point. What about your relative that just changed email addresses, or your old friend that you haven't heard from in years? If their email address doesn't happen to be on your whitelist it goes straight into the trash. They don't get a chance to prove they're not a spammer, and unless you're wading through your trash every day, you probably don't either.
  
  
• There is no IMAP support. This won't matter for people who don't care about IMAP, which before Mailblocks I didn't. But after using it and realizing how easy it is to organize email from any computer, I don't ever want to go back to POP. I can't remember for sure if AOL gives you POP, but I'm thinking they don't even give you that.
  
  
• Trackers are gone. Trackers are what Mailblocks calls email aliases. These are handy for giving out to companies or other entities you don't yet trust. If these addresses start receiving spam, you can "track" who sold you out. An example of a tracker address is thomas_cook-Amazon1234@mailblocks.com. If for example I ever got spam at that address, I'd delete it and cease doing business with Amazon.
  
  
• The ability to coalesce email from several different email addresses is gone. For example, my email address is not an @mailblocks.com address, it's an @earthnet.net address. Mailblocks handles this for me though - it reads and sends my earthnet.net mail. While I only use this for earthnet, I could also use it for gmail, yahoo, and other addresses if I wanted to, and I would only need to deal with one mail client.
  

In short, everything that made Mailblocks a unique solution is pretty much gone. I don't really even understand why AOL bought them, unless it was to pick up some good software developers. Up to this point anyway, they don't seem to have wanted much of the Mailblocks technology. It's really a shame.

I will continue using Mailblocks until my contract runs out. Hopefully I'll get at least another year out of it and then I'm not sure what I'll do. I may officially switch over to Gmail if they add IMAP support, or I may try to implement my own poor man's version of challenge/response. Yahoo! supports something very much like trackers (which I love), so they're also a contender. We'll have to see what the future holds.

Anyway, if you happen to be a Mailblocks user, I hope you found this interesting. If you're curious, see pictures of the different web interfaces here.