Clearmymail.com domain listed for sale

** This item has been updated - see followup below **

The following link claims that the Clearmymail.com domain name is listed for sale by Sedo (owned by United Internet AG, who also own 1&1 – through which the domain is registered).

http://whois.domaintools.com/clearmymail.com

Following more intermittent outages last week, in which incoming emails were lost altogether, what  alternatives are there to Clearmymail? I can find none that filter individual POP3 emails the same way.  Unfortunately, every other anti-spam firm that I know of, requires changes to the domain's MX (Mail Exchange) records so the entire email feed is directed to them at root DNS level. This puts your email service entirely in their hands. Consequently they are mainly aimed not at consumers but businesses instead, and enterprise-level solutions may charge £120+ a year. GFI.com, for example, starts at £180 + VAT per year for a minimum of 10 mailboxes.

Mailwasher free spam filtering software is semi-automatic For now, as a temporary if retrograde solution I am using Mailwasher, free software to filter my emails on my PC before they reach my main email program. Enter your POP3 mailbox details into Mailwasher to let it do its job. It flags up some spam automatically and can build up whitelists and blacklists, and also bounce dodgy mails back from whence they came (aka “back scatter”). Junk mail is cleared out which allows your main mail program to collect what's left.  Using Mailwasher is onerous but it works extremely well, though I can think of far better ways to spend my time and this is of little use if I want to check raw mail on my phone or tablet instead.

Without paying $$$ lots for a corporate service one solution is to switch to eg Microsoft's Outlook.com email and move it online. I feel Outlook is easier to get along with than over-elaborate Gmail. Only my opinion.  Consider migrating your address book to Outlook.com and get an Outlook address, and just manage the transition with your contacts over several months. Many PC-based email programs can actually handle Gmail and Outlook POP3 mail anyway, even my ancient old Eudora program will. You also get free online web storage.

I will also experiment with some mail-forwarding ideas, to see how to filter the plague of spam from my regular emails.

https://www.outlook.com
https://mail.google.com/

Update on Thursday, April 30, 2015 at 4:35PM by Alan W

Update

A routine check of my recent posts shows DomainTools had a redesign and the domain is no longer highlighted this way as being for sale.

Clearmymail problems?

Regretably I found Clearmymail has been erratic for the past 3-4 days, and I now have tested and proved to myself that some mail disappeared into a black hole during this time.  The website may or may not be up (or down) and mail may still be collected (which I witnessed using webmail to view my POP3), but then it never arrives: I have nothing to collect, and my mailbox has fallen silent.

If you can't log in to stop CMM collecting, you can break the system by changing your POP3 password. That will stop mail being collected. Then in your email program, change the server from mail01.clearmymail.com to your regular one, and at least you can fetch mail again (spam and all).

It's easy to be harsh. It's a shame that Clearmymail can be good when it's working but when it breaks there is no information or support, and problems are becoming all too frequent. The suspected loss of mail (even worse than it piling up somewhere) is worrying. This however is reflected in the low price. There is no similar third party cloud-type service that filters mail this way for such a low cost, but the search is on for a more robust solution.

For those stuck in the lurch, there is more Clearmymail info and resources on my website, just use the Search box on the right, or click the Clearmymail tag below.

Clearmymail down: domain expired

Updated on Tuesday, November 18, 2014 at 12:57PM by Alan W

Updated on Wednesday, November 19, 2014 at 12:46AM by Alan W

Updated on Wednesday, November 19, 2014 at 6:55PM by Alan W

Updated on Thursday, November 20, 2014 at 1:53PM by Alan W

Updated on Thursday, November 27, 2014 at 10:14PM by Alan W

Clearmymail's domain name problem (or their ISP's, anyway) caused an outtage for several days which broke my incoming Email. Here's the background and some workarounds.

Click to read more ...

Clearmymail up and down...

I decided to renew my Clearmymail subscription for a further year. I tend to avoid buying longer-term subs. because you never know what’s likely to happen in coming years and you might lose your money.

The helpful information displayed when Clearmymail is down6^th August and another outage from Clearmymail – users are greeted with a ‘Service Unavailable’ message with no details of the problem or the likely time to restore.  Recent erratic problems with logging in or fetching mail make it hard to love Clearmymail sometimes despite its low price. In my case it has filtered out more than 100,000 junk mails over the years but I have found little if any response to emails or customer support when there’s a problem, which makes it doubly frustrating to use. ClearMyMail’s website has also been neglected and badly needs an update: its latest spam news update hasn’t changed in six years.

Despite this, for home users or micro businesses there is nothing quite like Clearmymail to filter junk mail at such a low annual cost (£17.95).  I could not run mobile email without it as my smartphone would soon be deluged with junk.

Systems that filter your mail directly are few and far between and almost all of them seem to be aimed at businesses or ISPs. So if you subscribe to Clearmymail, then you have to take it for what it is – a cheap and cheerful but very effective email filtering service that screens out spam before it reaches you, but is prone to sudden and inexplicable outages at times. However, unlike in 2013 there have been no very lengthy ones so far.

It’s best to understand how CMM works overall and have an action plan in case lengthy outages occur without warning. If Clearmymail stops fetching your mail (often seen as your email going silent – CMM has stopped collecting it, so it's piling up somewhere), then consider (a) using your ISP's Webmail service if available to read your POP3 mailbox direct; or (b) download mail direct from your POP3 mailbox using your Email client (set up a separate 'account', pointing direct to your raw mail box) . You’ll get the spam as well, but at least you can keep things moving.

When your POP3 mailbox starts emptying all by itself, that’s a sign that Clearmymail has started collecting mail again.  How to bypass Clearmymail as a temporary workaround is described in this article.

Update on Monday, August 18, 2014 at 2:03PM by Alan W

Mon 18th August and Clearmymail has been mostly down much of the morning, and I have been unable to collect mail. However it still seems to be *fetching* my mail, judging by my POP3 mailbox which I checked via Webmail.  My post has some workarounds to help keep things going in the meantime: use Webmail, or fetch raw unfiltered mail direct from your POP3 box using your email client.

Update on Monday, August 18, 2014 at 3:03PM by Alan W

(3. p.m.)  the service is Unavailable again. No apology. I managed to log in just before it went down, and turned off my account in Account Settings. Means that CMM stops fetching mail and sitting on it.  Now Webmail can be used on the raw POP3 mailbox, so at least I can keep tabs on it that way.

Update on Wednesday, November 19, 2014 at 11:50AM by Alan W

Clearmymail domain expired

The bad news: the .com domain name expired on ~18th November 2014 and seems to be in the hands of a domain squatter, though the .co.uk is still operational. However, the mail service is hosted under the dot-com name, which means that you can no longer fetch email from mail01.clearmymail.com. That side of the service has broken and gone off the air. The firm is presently unreachable. Whether they can successfully migrate to the .co.uk instead, or they give it up as a bad job, remains to be seen.

How to disable Clearmymail from fetching your mail and sitting on it, is described in this more up to date link:

http://alanwinstanley.squarespace.com/alan-winstanleys-journal/2014/11/18/clearmymail-down-domain-expired.html

Clearmymail down and out?

Clearmymail anti-spam - when it works, it's great. When it's down, you're in the darkAnti-spam service Clearmymail has fallen down again, leaving users with no email filtering service and no way of knowing whether or not Clearmymail is sat on a pile of its customers’ unfiltered emails.

For unknown reasons Clearmymail has stopped collecting and filtering mail without telling its customers why. Their website offers no clue.

Problems started to be noticed this week when logging in to fetch mail, and then the email delivery dried up altogether. Logging in to check the account – at least the website is working – it’s clear that filtering fizzled out on Wednesday 16^th October.

Reasonable people understand that network or server problems can arise without warning, and time is needed to resolve them. The last major outage that I recall was last year, when major storm damage in the USA affected Amazon’s servers, on which Clearmymail depends. It took several days for the service to be restored.

When Clearmymail is good it’s good. It’s also pretty cheap, all things considered. The problem with Clearmymail is (once again) that there is no tech support, no status update and no way of knowing when service may be restored. Don’t think about Twitter this time, because their Twitter page was last updated in 2012. https://twitter.com/clearmymail  Overall, it’s a disappointing way of handling outages and keeping loyal customers informed.

Clearmymail workaround

There are several temporary workarounds. The first is to see if you can use webmail on your regular (unfiltered) POP3 mailbox. I just did, and I found more than 100 mails sitting there. It’s probably best to sift through it via the web browser and delete them there. Or check out Mail2web.com.

You can also amend your Email client to bypass Clearmymail and fetch email directly, warts ‘n all. You can turn off Clearmymail temporarily by logging into My Account, Account Settings and your mailbox password is shown in plain text.  Edit it by adding e.g. an = sign after it. Clearmymail won't be able to log into your email box. (Reverse this process to enable it again.)

In your Email program, change the incoming (POP3) server from mail01.clearmymail.com to your regular mail host’s address instead, e.g. mail.mydomain.co.uk. In my case, no other changes were needed to my Eudora email program as the username and password are the same. Fetching mail, 110 of them quickly arrived on my PC. Of course, they are entirely unfiltered, and just 13 found their way into my Junk folder and the rest had to be sorted through manually.

Mail will have to be fetched manually this way until I re-enable Clearmymail collection again. Let’s hope that Clearmymail gets back online soon, and meantime the search is on for another anti-spam solution that doesn’t cost the earth.

Update on Friday, October 18, 2013 at 3:05PM by Alan W

I later found that I can't change the password in the Clearmymail control panel, it's locked. So all I can do is check my raw POP3 mail with webmail/ Eudora, until Clearmymail starts working again. I guess that's when my POP3 mailbox starts emptying 'automatically' again and my own Email client doesn't fetch mail any more. 

My mobile phone still points to Clearmymail, so I could also use that to see if Clearmymail is working properly again. Unhelpfully, it just says 'No mail' at the moment.

The search is on for another anti-spam service, I noted GFI offers MailEssentials Online at about £60 + VAT a year for five users. You have to change the MX records in your domain's DNS though.

Update on Monday, October 21, 2013 at 1:45PM by Alan W

(Five days later)

As predicted, my Clearmymail box suddenly started filling up again, so things are returning to normal. Checking the raw POP3 mailbox manually was a good way of keeping track of everything.

Update on Thursday, December 19, 2013 at 12:32AM by Alan W

(19th December 2013) Another outage - I wondered why my post had dried up, and when I checked my own POP3 there were nearly 50 mails sat there over the past 48 hours, some of which were urgent. Clearmymail had stopped fetching mail, and now the website says 'Service Unavailable'.

Best to use webmail direct on your POP3 box, or switch your Email software to fetch POP3 mail direct from your host. Of course, there is no news or hint of a return of service, but that's normal.

(later) Mail has started to drift in again, sadly with no response to Email.

Update on Wednesday, November 19, 2014 at 1:38PM by Alan W

Clearmymail.com Domain Name Expired

For an update (Nov. 2014) see my latest article at

http://alanwinstanley.com/alan-winstanleys-journal/2014/11/18/clearmymail-down-domain-expired.html