POP access to web e-mail

The major web based e-mail providers have been cranking up their spam filtering, which is great, but I still have to slog through it to catch the false positives - mail I'd like to see that got incorrectly marked as spam. For instance, I would have missed a GMail invite yesterday if I'd just dumped the spam, but going through it invloves checking 300+ likely spams a day. That seems to a common problem, from talking to friends and scanning blogs.

POP email clients have a lot more control over spam filtering - for instance, SpamPal and others allow custom black / whitelists, baysian filters, regular expression matches, etc.

There's a pretty good comparison of different spam filtering systems here, by the way.

I've been testing a POP interface to Yahoo e-mail, YahooPops. It does a pretty good job, but has one quirk - if you elect to leave messages on server (so I can download at work and at home) and empty my deleted mail, it gets downloaded again. So I don't empty my deleted e-mail, which is no big deal. They're at a .6 release and cranking out pretty quickly.

I got a GMail invite - thanks, Marcie! - and found Pop Goes The GMail (PGtGm) yesterday. Stefano Demiliani blogged about it today, so it's gotta be good. It's a .NET app, which is kinda cool.

So now I'm planning to set up a GMail account with a crazy name, and setting up a forwarder to send my e-mail to it. If the forwarder gets too much spam I can migrate over to a new one with not too much trouble. That's kind of what SneakeMail does. I was thinking about Mailblocks, but Omar's review indicates I'd likely be right back in the same boat - scanning my “probably spams“ folder every day.