The best webmail services

SpamCop

As you might expect, SpamCop is an email service that is dedicated to pretty much one thing - stopping spam. The issue of unsolicited mail is so massive today that it can genuinely get in the way of actually getting anything done on the net - especially when your business or your personal life relies heavily on email. Obviously, there are various junk mail filters out there for other web-based services and for applications, too - but they all have their own quirks and failings. SpamCop aims to be the ultimate service for those who are fed up with junk mail.

It's more flexible than many of the other webmail services. For starters, there's POP and IMAP access to your mailbox from any desktop client that you fancy. You can have it bring in mail from other POP servers, and you can also set it to spoof your return address and your send address. In short, it's a great service for those who want a server-side mail filter - you can take your company email address, have SpamCop pick up the mail through POP, filter it through its servers then deliver it through to your mail client as POP, minus all the spam. Many of us in the office have found this an invaluable facility!

So what are the spam features? Well, any mail that looks like it should be spam is sent to the held mail folder, and you can sort through this at your leisure. You can then report the whole folder as spam, if you want, where it then gets sent back to SpamCop for analysis by the techies there, who use the data to tune the spam filters - an ongoing process. You can do all sorts of cool stuff, like analyse the number of spams you get per day, go get graphs and charts of the email activity, paste in the text and headers of spam from other emails, all in the name of getting away from the the most annoying of junk mail.

How does SpamCop work, then? Well, the site takes pains to point out that it doesn't actually scan the body text of an email - that, the company says, would take too long and would not scale to the amount of users it has. Instead, the service simply looks at mail headers and compares them with the headers of known spam sources. If they match, the mail is marked as spam and put in the held folder. If not, it goes on through to your inbox.

SpamCop claims 80-90% success rate in positively ID'ing spam, and our tests have found that the rate is actually higher, more in the 95% range. The number of false positives is incredibly low, since the number of people that send email with spam-a-like headers that aren't spammers are incredibly small - the only people are those who are unlucky enough to share a mail server with a spammer.

Of course, like anything worth having, you have to pay for SpamCop. It's $30 a year, which is a pretty reasonable fee, in our opinion, especially if you really do get an awful lot of spam.

How about the rest of the service? Well, it's really, really clunky to use the webmail. The software is the well-known Horde, which isn't exactly cutting edge when it comes to dealing with webmail. Lots of tickboxes, lots of hyperlinks, and a very plain interface. It's functional, just about - but SpamCop, like HushMail, could really do with an upgrade on the interface front to make it more appealing.

On the plus side, the service goes beyond even Google in terms of mailbox space - there's no enforced size limit. None at all. However, you may wish to be pessimistic - when using webmail, the bigger the mailbox, the longer it takes to load, and you'd be better off making sure that, at the very least, you archive your inbox to folders, meaning you can keep your inbox nice and lean.

Of course, if you just intend on using this as a filtering service and grabbing your POP mail out of there, then mailbox size won't be important to you. However, as great as the anti-spam is, it's really hard to recommend this as a great webmail tool, partly because the interface is so awful. We'd be really tempted to suggest that the best way to use SpamCop as webmail is by using the POP-grabbing option in Gmail. You could make SpamCop grab your email, filter it, then let Gmail grab it from SpamCop, giving you super-clean email and some decent webmail functionality. If you can afford the $30 a year, this could well be the ultimate uber-webmail solution for efficiency, if not elegance.

Uppers: Amazing anti-spam leaves your inbox clean, lots of POP/IMAP flexibility, unlimited mailbox size.
Downers: Horrendous interface makes webmail a chore.