OnlyMyEmail Personal (2013)

What do I want to see when I look at my Inbox? Only my email, of course, not any spam, phishing scams, or other trash. For $19.99 per year, OnlyMyEmail Personal (2013) offers exactly that. It's not as flexible as some antispam solutions, but in my real-world tests its accuracy was nothing short of astounding.

When you sign up for the service, you get a brand-new email address within the onlymyemail.com domain. You're perfectly free to use this as your sole email address, but the company recognizes that most people would rather have a root canal than change email providers. So, with your subscription you get the ability to filter any two POP3 email accounts.

OnlyMyEmail has existed in more-or-less its current form for over ten years. It doesn't change, because it doesn't need to change. As with other products that don't use traditional version numbering, I've added "(2013)" to the name to distinguish this review from others.

Getting Started
To set up a POP3 account for filtering, you log in to your OnlyMyEmail account and enter the account's username, password, and mail server. There's a link to test your information, to make sure that OnlyMyEmail can access it.

Next, you must reconfigure your regular email client so that it downloads mail from your onlymyemail.com account. You can download mail via POP3 or IMAP, whichever is more convenient. Once you've completed this simple configuration, you'll get your email as usual, but you won't see any spam, just a daily report of messages deleted by the service.

When someone sends you a message, the OnlyMyEmail service receives and processes it before passing it along to you. According to the FAQ, this can take from two to ten minutes, a fact worth remembering when you're awaiting an important message.

Some Limitations
As noted, the only type of external email account that OnlyMyEmail can filter is a POP3 account. The free Cloudmark DesktopOne Basic 1.2 will filter one account of any type: POP3, IMAP, Exchange, even Web-based mail. If you need antispam for multiple accounts, Cloudmark DesktopOne Pro 1.2 will do the job.

Users of OnlyMyEmail Personal are limited to filtering 400 external emails per day. That's not much of a limit. I'm on email all day, every day, and I rarely receive over 200 messages. Note that this limit does not apply if messages are sent directly to your onlymyemail.com account.

Typically you'll keep sending outbound messages through the same SMTP server you've always used. If you do choose to send via OnlyMyEmail's SMTP server, there are a few limits. You can't sent to more than 25 recipients at once, and you can't sent more than 100 messages per hour. OnlyMyEmail CEO Stephen Canale points out that this limits the flow of email from compromised accounts and makes OnlyMyEmail "a very unattractive target for spammers to subscribe or hack." Canale went on to say, "We're effectively useless to spammers, and very proud of it."

All of the service's activity happens online, with nothing at all installed on your system. Because of this, it doesn't need a help system or a tech support team. Users are encouraged to read the online FAQ and troubleshooting tips, with an option to submit bug reports and feedback.

Simple Configuration
You don't necessarily have to perform any configuration beyond the initial setup, but there are a few areas to explore, starting with your preferences for what sort of mail should be deleted. The service always deletes spam; turning off that feature isn't optional. By default, it also deletes viruses, virus alerts, and mail from foreign domains.

You can also configure it to delete direct marketing mail, newsletters, chain letters, and mail from listservs or Yahoo groups. If you find that you're missing mail that you actually want, you simply whitelist the sender. There's also an option to manually create a list of senders to always allow or to always block.

An unusual feature called OME Passcode gives you a way to ensure specific messages will always get through. Your passcode must be 8-15 characters, no spaces, with at least one letter and one digit. If a sender includes the passcode as the very first word in the message subject, OnlyMyEmail will always let it through.

Source: http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/ziffdavis/pcmag/~3/aJsfSQFPZUo/0,2817,2420091,00.asp

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