Mailblocks, the first webmail service to offer challenge and response has really gone down the hill. About 2 years, I was humping their service and even blogged about it as I loved their service and offering. The whole idea of challenge-n-response was not the best solution but it did cut almost all my spam and I was willing to put up with the nuisance of having people that email me for the first time to respond to their web-based CAPTCHA. Then comes AOL and buys them out and everything has gone down the hill since that point. AOL bought out Mailblocks to power their free email service that’s being offered are part of AIM and it seems like all the engineering and support people are working on the AOL side of the house, ignoring all the customers that are on the Mailblocks side of the house.
Let’s take this week for an example — Mailblocks has been down most of the day yesterday and they are still down. Can you imagine a 24+ hr outage on your application and the wrath of your users? I can’t wait to cancel my account that I am paying for and move everything over to GMail.
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I just posted a blog entry about a spam solution using gmail as the filter. Find it here.
Well, they are down again today. I guess it’s time to find another email solution. It galls me that I’ve been paying for this service from the beginning (almost 2 years), and now I get treated like I’m a nusance.
I’ve never had any real issues w/ mailblocks until earlier this week. About 3 days ago my e-mail was down for about 15 hours. As of this morning it’s down again! Yet the same message still pops up about “maintenace”, “…check back in a few minutes”, “…during times when it will affect the least number of people”. Sounds like b.s. to me. The messgae should say “Most likely be down for hours on end… maybe days”, “Maintenace will occur in the middle of the day, in the middle of the work week”, “We suck!”, etc.
Well, I feel slightly better now.
Hi guys,
I am glad I am not alone. I love(d) Mailblocks. I egt the feeling we are being driven out and I am tempted to treat them as the utility (like electricity, telephone) and say I want credit for the 48 hours I lost. The amount would not be important, what would be important is that it would be difficult to do and representative of our struggles. Any other ideas?
All was (prety) good until AOL bought them.
A few items: First, after sending Mailblocks a complaint letter, I received a detailed instruction message to help the “team” solve MY problem. I laughed at the notion and told them the busted mail service was THEIR problem, and I wanted it fixed today, but that I was willing to help them with debugging once we negotiated an hourly rate.
Since they have been mostly down since, I’m looking for a reliable, relatively spam-free service. Any suggestions?
Like others here, I went from really liking them to intensely disliking them. Why do acquisitions have to be the kiss of death?
No doubt, it’s time to steer clear not only from mailblocks, but also from aol.
I’ve given up on Mailblocks as well. It’s a shame, because I was happy with the service until AOL started messing with it. PC magazine recently rated Yahoo’s email service as best so I’m giving them a try.
I switched to spamarrest, and have been very happy. They also do challenge and response, have been around for at least as long as mailblocks, and look like they have all the feature I’m used to, plus a whole bunch of new ones. Plus, they’re getting better and better over time, and under active development, unlike mailblocks.
I am down for a week now. The fuckers should be killed.
I am ridiculously pissed off- first all of the outages you mentioned, then they lost all e-mails received and sent between July 21 to Aug 15, and now I am not able to log-in claiming my user name is invalid.
I love(d) Mailblocks, the poor man who died last year, the founder of Mailblocks, probably would hate what AOL is doing to his business.
Lyn
Again it is down. When I access the login page and enter my name/password, the page comes up again–it won’t let me log on. I tried accessing it through other means–it rejects my password and/or username. What a bunch of crap. Just another wakeup call to not rely too heavily on email–or at least have some backups when it goes down(and Mailblocks does GO DOWN).
Found this Blog while researching whether Mailblocks went under or not….I noticed today, that I have not received any email in 7 days ( I have my authorized email forwarded from mailblocks to my outlook) Since noticing the issue, I have NOT been able to get mailblocks site to come up….grrrrr.
I just did a google on “mailblocks sucks” and found this blog.
I too humped heavily for them and paid, my girlfriend paid twice even after aol swallwed them up. She had resumes out using her mb add – doh!
I have complained so many times to them. It is such a shitload email providor. Especially when there are so many other options. AOL just wanted to extort mailblocks users into signing on with them. Fuck them and their bait and switch bs. There is Gmail and thunderbird and so many others. It just sucks when you are job hunting and have relied on a service which you PAID for you expect it to be at least as reliable as a freebie. Hotail is a more reliable option. Hell, they don’t even charge your junkmail to your account limit anymore.
Don’t pay for mailblocks!!!!
I am absolutely stunned at the incompetence of their technical staff and the arrogance of the “email technical support.” If you want to get the most simpered, canned replies, try emailing them. I and many others have repeatedly asked them to post on their Web site a server-down notice. They refuse to do it. They even block you out of the front door many times when they go down. This morning they decide to “do maintenance” all Sunday morning. Do they assume the entire country in in church on Sunday morning. I’m outta there. Now I have to change 1,000 email addresses to move, but I’ve had it with them. Plus, their SMTP server will not allow an attachment larger than 6 MB.
Don’t use mailblocks! They have gotten decidedly worse since AOL took them over!!!
“Mailblocks email service will be discontinued on November 16, 2005. Once the account is closed, there will be no way to gain access to the account and all the data will be permanently deleted.”
granted 30 days is waht is required but jeez…
and
“The Mailblocks Team has been busy creating the next generation free email service, called AIM Mail. AIM Mail is a free web-based email service with a sleek interface and a client-like feature set, based on Mailblocks technology that you’ve grown to love. ”
ok…no challenge response….AOL sucks ass
But what’s the best alternative to Mailblocks, now that they are going off the air? And don’t tell me spamarrest. Looks like they’ve got paid people all over the place trying to get you to move to that provider. One of every three discussion groups and blogs say use spamarrest. Plus they’ve already got a paid link on Google. Google mailblocks and you get a free offer. Funny when you go to the spamarrest page they don’t even list mailblocks as one of the alternative email providers.
is this affecting their pay subscribers?
Yeah, bummer about Mailblocks. Lately it has been very unstable and unresponsive. I think my choices are Fastmail.FM or Tuffmail.com. I really like the unlimited alias feature of Tuffmail at $24.95/year which was what I was paying at Mailblocks. You only get 5 aliases at Fastmail.
Alan,
Yes, it affects everyone. They have now updated the loging page. Mailblocks is going off the air on Nov 16th, and everything will be deleted. You’re history.
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