Hope this isn't a repeat. I tried to leave a comment earlier but may have fumbled it.

I'm the author of UseBestMail. Tim's dismisses UseBestMail without understanding it or better yet, trying it out himself. If he'd done either he would have discovered that UseBestMail marks subject lines like his product does -- simply. It looks like he has a good procuct too.

But Tim is wrong about UseBestMail. First, no ISP involvement is needed. The client software in cooperation with our server does the whole job. If you read the more detailed articles at the web site you'll find out that it works between a few friends who want a spam-free channel, or as a very complete anti-spam solution -- including whitelist, challenge/response and preview -- in addition to effortless stamps. And, it's free.

I personally invite you to try it out for yourself. Go to my web site at: http://www.usebestmail.com
And email me if you'd like to comment on it or have any trouble at all.

Regards,
Martel Firing

Martel,

You are correct that I did not look into the details and I have not tried the software. I'm also very unlikely to try it for a few reasons:

I understand that it allows a spam-free like channel between friends who are all using UseBestMail but I still don't get the point really. I'm not likely to get any spam from my friends/colleagues/business associates and their email is extremely unlikely to be tagged as spam by SimpleFilter. Your basic principal "to stop spam before it is sent" really breaks because a spammer certainly isn't going to use UseBestMail.

I understand the whitelisting component. Just about any spam technique uses whitelist/blacklist type features. We typically don't require them for SimpleFilter except for the odd newsletter here and there that look very much like spam.

I'm not a fan of challenge/response at all. I am annoyed when I receive a challenge and more times than not I'm unlikely to actually bother dealing with a challenge unless the email is important. Just recently I tried sending an email to a friend and received a challenge. It was just a quick one line email about something unimportant. You guessed it, I couldn't be bothered dealing with the challenge. I suppose I will at some point if I need to get an important email through.

Under your point of "receipt of mail from strangers" it sounds as though one is likely to wade through all the spam picking out the 1 or 2 that might be legit. I don't have time for that and frankly don't need to do that with SimpleFilter. I check less than 10 emails out of hundreds a day that end up in my spam folder that could potentially be a legitimate email. I realize that this is a user decision on whether to ignore these messages and potentially false positives but with SimpleFilter and tagging of Low, Medium, and High we've found that Medium and High can essentially be ignored without worrying about false positives at all. In fact most of our corporate customers drop Medium and High at the server level shortly after running SimpleFilter for a few weeks.

In any event, I do like to see you fighting the battle from a different angle. If we hit the spammers from every possible angle maybe one day we will win this fight entirely.

For the time being SimpleFilter has made SPAM a non-issue for me in dealing with my email inbox.

Tim

Tim, first I want to thank you for letting me post to your blog. It sounds like you have a good product in SimpleFilter and I wish you good luck in marketing it.

I've added a blog of my own as an experiment - usebestmail.blogspot.com and you are welcome to post there.

In spite of your negative review I hope others less committed than you will actually give UseBestMail a try and report their experiences. It is very difficult to introduce the world to an unfamiliar concept because people are seldom willing to be the first to try a new thing.

But the battle isn't won until the spammers cry uncle, and that will probably take some innovation.

I'd be happy to point people to UseBestMail so they can give it a try and report their findings here or over on Martel's blog. Of course, people should also try SimpleFilter ;)

BTW, is there a RSS feed for you blog Martel?

Thanks for the links Tim.

I'm so completely new to blogging that I really didn't know what an RSS feed was. So I looked it up on Blogger. They use Atom, (on http://usebestmail.blogspot.com/Atom.xml) but suggested trying RSS via FeedBurner.com. I've signed up for that: http://feeds.feedburner.com/PreventSpamNow I'm not sure whether this gives me two feeds or one?

The next task is to figure out what the RSS actually does. It looks like I need a reader of some sort for that. Anyway, thanks for the help and hope I can return the favor somehow.

No problem Martel. Yes, you'll need an RSS reader of some sorts (typically called an aggregator). I use BlogLines but there are many of them.

It looks to me like you just have one feed. Feedburner probably just knows how to read your blogspot feed. Strange that your Atom feed directly from blogspot didn't seem to work for me. The FeedBurner one did however.