An Apology, And Some More Ways Out Of Spam and Viruses

By | February 6, 2004

Just got an angry email from the folk at 0Spam.Net, who I mentioned in an earlier post as one of the companies somewhat, er, quick to congratulate itself in the wave for avoiding the worst of MyDoom.

Bill Franklin, 0Spam.Net president, writes that “Whether our product works or not and its value to your readers seems to not be of importance in your column, we’re just someone out of whom to get some mileage, at the cost of tarnishing our reputation.”

My apologies. Perhaps I wasn’t fair. I wasn’t questioning the quality of the service; It just appeared unseemly that, while business and home users were still grappling with MyDoom infections, companies should be firing out dozens of press releases trumpeting their successes in keeping the virus out. But that aside, there are some excellent email services that do keep out spam and viruses (I’m using, and have recommended, one of them: AlienCamel) and 0Spam.Net sounds like another one. These services transfer the onus of filtering out rubbish, both destructive and annoying, so that the end user doesn’t need to set up a spam filter, or an anti-virus program on their computer. All you have to do is to cough up a bit of extra money ($15 for six months for AlienCamel, $5 a month for 0Spam.net) , and change your email settings a tad.

Of 0Spam.Net, Bill writes: “The truth is, our service works nearly flawlessly – try to find another anti-spam, anti-virus product that comes anywhere close to our accuracy level: 100% detection of viruses and a 1 in 2,250,000 error rate of false positives for spam detection with a spam detection rate of 99.996%.” That’s a pretty good ratio.

Another service that promises to do the same thing is ZoEmail, just launched yesterday. For $1 a month ZoEmail claims to ”completely stop spam and finally give e-mail users real control over what lands in their inbox”. I’ve written an entry on ZoEmail here.

One thought on “An Apology, And Some More Ways Out Of Spam and Viruses

  1. Jeff Stephen

    Please do another article on how many time 0SPAM has disrupted service to its customers this year alone. When a company relies on receiving their emails to do business, we rather get SPAM then get no emails at all. As far as I’m concern they SUCK! After the fourth storm hit south Florida, the rocket scientist running the company decided to move thier operations from where ever it was to a datacenter. To you and I that sounds like a great idea, but the idots moved to a datacenter in Florida, completely defeating the purpose. At the present moment we are not able to receive emails form outside our organization for the third time in as many days. I am happy to have found your article, and will be looking into ZoEmail.

    Reply

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