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    E-Mail Security Services for Small Business and Individuals

    Written by

    Larry Seltzer
    Published December 29, 2003
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      A good number of Internet Service Providers offer decent security features, still many still dont. If your ISP doesnt block viruses or filter spam, or if your unhappy with their services, you have more options than you might think.

      Changing ISPs to one with better service isnt necessarily an easy thing for many individuals and small businesses. If youre a cable modem customer you probably cant just take your business to some other cable company. And almost certainly, youd have to change your e-mail address, a major hassle.

      Of course, its possible to run local spam filtering software, but who needs another program hogging memory on their system and slowing it down? For example, I run Norton Antispam and my performance is about as fast Manny Ramirez running out a grounder to second. Im about fed up with how slow it is.

      During a recent eSeminar, Ziff Davis Medias online teleconferences, I advocated for the managed-service approach to enterprise spam filtering. (You can still listen to this conference and view the presentations here.)

      Services like Postini and Frontbridge offer advantages for enterprises. These services can do a better job than most at filtering spam because they get to see a lot of it, and a lot of ham (legitimate mail) as well. Most of them scan mail for viruses and worms with at least one scanning technology. They can queue your mail for you if your own servers go down. Last, but not least, an inherent feature of their architecture can keep the spam and viruses off your network completely.

      There are also similar spam services geared towards individuals and small businesses too. Ive found four. Two are very inexpensive, and in a blast from the dotcom era, one of them is free. Unlike changing your ISP, you dont have to change your e-mail address. The service becomes the client for your ISP mail, and you retrieve your filtered mail from the service.

      I reviewed AlienCamel (the name is an anagram of “Clean Email”) for PC Magazine a few months ago. The service worked pretty well, and even though its geared towards individuals it has a lot of the same advantages as the enterprise products, plus some unique advantages.

      Like the enterprise products, AlienCamel scans for viruses, although you should definitely scan locally for extra security. Like the big guys, AlienCamel gets to see a lot more spam than any product running on a desktop can. And because the mail is filtered before you get to it, you dont waste Internet bandwidth and disk space on spam and viruses.

      AlienCamel also gives you the option of using IMAP for your mail client, even if your ISP only offers POP3. If youre unfamiliar with IMAP, it basically allows you to have server-side folders and synchronize them with your host-side mail client.

      However, theres a

      big problem

      for many people with IMAP: Symantecs desktop security products, such as Norton Antivirus, only scan POP3 mail. Even though AlienCamel scans for viruses, you still need to run your own local antivirus protection. So be warned: if you run Norton Antivirus, youll have to use AlienCamel in POP3 mode (I believe POP3 support is part of the IMAP spec).

      Since my review, AlienCamel has added a number of enhancements. They now have full Web-mail access to the account, which is great for when youre on the road. They now support disposable addresses, which are throwaway addresses that forward mail to your real account; so if the address starts to receive spam you can simply delete it. The other changes are a bit esoteric. AlienCamel costs $15.99 for 6 months.

      Next page: Fusemail, OnlyMyEmail and Mailshell…

      Fusemail, OnlyMyEmail and Mailshell

      …”>

      I looked at Mailshell Spamcatcher early this year. The review examined the companys Outlook plug-in, but it also has an end-user service. You likely wont find it on Mailshells Web site even if you look, because the service isnt a part of the companys core business anymore.

      Mailshell appears more interested in pushing its business-oriented service that filters entire mail domains. One reason is that the mail account service for individuals isnt based on the companys core Mailshell SDK engine, so its not a product with much future for them. When I tested the Outlook plug-in I also looked at the service. I considered it complicated but a great idea; so its worth consideration, even though Mailshells lack of commitment will give potential customers pause (and since its competitors appear more interested in the segment).

      FuseMail is a free service. I havent had a chance to test it, but the site gives a pretty clear idea of what its about. Customers can use it as a centralized service to consolidate multiple mail accounts and from there read the mail from multiple devices. It too creates an IMAP account. While I see nothing about antivirus support, FuseMail claims to support Yahoo, Hotmail and even AOL mail accounts in addition to POP3 and IMAP accounts.

      FuseMail goes several steps further, creating essentially a server-side Outlook-type product. The service includes a server-side address book, calendar, notes, tasks list and journal (it sure sounds like Outlook). Theres a full Web interface to all these features in addition to the IMAP version. It looks pretty nice (check out the online demo.)

      In addition, the Journal and Tasks interfaces arent useless like the ones in Outlook. If there were a interface to synch them with Outlook, the service that would be truly impressive. In fact, the company said that an Outlook plug-in for FuseMails services is “coming soon.” (Hot dog, the FuseMail product looks really interesting! Ill be coming back to take a deeper look at it in the future.)

      FuseMails spam filtering has a Bayesian look to it; you can execute rules on mail depending on whether the filter thinks its likely or very likely to be spam. Its rules engine is also used to consolidate mail from multiple accounts.) The filters also uses whitelists and blacklists.

      Is FuseMail one of those nutty dotcom ideas that cant survive because it makes no money? For the moment yes, but they say that “coming soon” they will have versions of their software for multi-user organizations and a service provider version for ISPs to buy in order to provide to their customers as a service, and it would appear an extra-cost one. Presumably these other two versions will cost money. I truly hope they offer antivirus protection at least as an extra-cost option, because its a major hole in their virtual offering at this point.

      Unlike FuseMail, OnlyMyEmail is a mail-only system. While it does provide antivirus scanning in addition to spam filtering, it provides only a POP3 account for the user, and both of those only at higher levels of service. It also has consolidation for up to three outside accounts and can read AOL and Web-based mail.

      There are three levels of monthly service: the $3 Basic, $4 Plus and $5 Pro versions.

      The Basic account is bare bones, lacking antivirus, Web mail access, or even a OnlyMyEmail address. Instead, with the Basic account, the service periodically scans your mail account and deletes messages it determines to be spam. This approach means theres a reasonable chance youll get spam when you check your mail, because some message will have come in since the last time the service came around. For this reason, OnlyMyEmail asks that Basic customers only check for mail infrequently, and for this reason, two users cant check an account at the same time.

      Basic is clearly a bad deal; for only $1 or $2 more per month you can get many more capabilities, including an OnlyMyEmail address and the ability to send mail through their SMTP servers. However, this makes it more expensive than the competition.

      OnlyMyEmails site touts its spam filtering capabilities. In places, the company comes close to saying that customers wont find any false positives, period. This is quite a claim. At the same time, they provide little information about their techniques, so its impossible to judge their credibility.

      The closest the company comes with an explanation is to say that it doesnt try to identify spam, instead it tries to identify legitimate mail. This is an interesting idea and one Ive heard discussed in the past as a different approach for Bayesian filtering. Still, theres a long stretch (and plenty of details) from a discussion to an actual implementation in a product or service.

      This particular market presents end-users with an interesting variety of options for services, and as a general matter they have advantages when compared to desktop anti-spam software in terms of both performance and features. Services is the anti-spam model of the future.

      Security Center Editor Larry Seltzer has worked in and written about the computer industry since 1983.

      More from Larry Seltzer

      Larry Seltzer
      Larry Seltzer
      Larry Seltzer has been writing software for and English about computers ever since—,much to his own amazement— He was one of the authors of NPL and NPL-R, fourth-generation languages for microcomputers by the now-defunct DeskTop Software Corporation. (Larry is sad to find absolutely no hits on any of these +products on Google.) His work at Desktop Software included programming the UCSD p-System, a virtual machine-based operating system with portable binaries that pre-dated Java by more than 10 years.For several years, he wrote corporate software for Mathematica Policy Research (they're still in business!) and Chase Econometrics (not so lucky) before being forcibly thrown into the consulting market. He bummed around the Philadelphia consulting and contract-programming scenes for a year or two before taking a job at NSTL (National Software Testing Labs) developing product tests and managing contract testing for the computer industry, governments and publication.In 1991 Larry moved to Massachusetts to become Technical Director of PC Week Labs (now eWeek Labs). He moved within Ziff Davis to New York in 1994 to run testing at Windows Sources. In 1995, he became Technical Director for Internet product testing at PC Magazine and stayed there till 1998.Since then, he has been writing for numerous other publications, including Fortune Small Business, Windows 2000 Magazine (now Windows and .NET Magazine), ZDNet and Sam Whitmore's Media Survey.

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