Generally, if you use a program such as Microsoft Outlook, Qualcomm Eudora, Pegasus, or any other "POP3 email client," our service will work. It will not work with America Online because AOL does not use standard Internet protocols. It will not work with Hotmail because Microsoft does not currently permit POP3 access. Our service will work with Yahoo only if you've purchased their premium package that allows POP3 access.

PrismEmail is completely platform independent. That means you can use PrismEmail whether you are using Windows, Linux, Unix, or Macintosh. As long as your email client program supports "POP3 Protocol" PrismEmail should work fine. PrismEmail does not require you to install anything on your computer so it works equally well with all computers and operating systems. You also don't risk installing unknown software on your computer as is the case with many other anti-spam products.

When you sign-up, you will provide us with your POP3 server, username, and password. Our server will then automatically download your email from your POP3 server as if it were you, reviewing incoming email to determine whether or not the new email is real email or unwanted spam. If spam, it will be withheld so you don't have to download it or see it. If it's judged to be "real" email, it will be held for you to download. You will download your email from our server rather than your POP3 provider's server.

While unlikely, it is possible that PrismEmail will consider a given email spam even though it wasn't. Or perhaps it was spam but, for some reason, you want to see it. To handle these situations, once per day we will send you an email summary of all the spam that was blocked, 1-line per spam. Each blocked email will include a link that you can click on if you feel the message in question was wrongly classified as spam. When you click on the link, you'll be able to view the message online and/or mark it as "valid" so that it will be downloaded to your email client the next time you check email. You may also login to the website at any time to review what spam has been withheld.

No, when PrismEmail downloads email from your POP3 server it will be deleted from the POP3 server. This is necessary because you will be downloading your email from us, not from your POP3 provider. If we left the email on your POP3 server, your current POP3 account would quickly fill-up with email you've already downloaded and probably exceed your disk space quota causing your POP3 provider to return new incoming email.

Unlike other anti-spam services, PrismEmail only checks your POP3 account when you check your PrismEmail account. That is to say, if you use Microsoft Outlook to read email, Outlook will login to PrismEmail's email server. As Outlook logs in, PrismEmail will login to your POP3 account and download your email. This means our server won't download your email unless you download your email from us. The advantage to this is that our server isn't checking your POP3 account all day long when you only login periodically. This reduces the probability of your POP3 provider blocking access to PrismEmail (imagine what would happen if you and 1000 other users of your ISP started using PrismEmail--and we attempted to download email from each account every 5 minutes. That'd be 200 checks per minute and that could be frowned upon by your ISP).

Yes, PrismEmail can check up to 10 separate POP3 accounts on the same or on different servers. Every time you check your email at PrismEmail up to 10 distinct POP3 accounts will be checked for new mail. While we don't charge extra for this, the bandwidth consumed for checking the additional POP3 accounts will be counted towards your bandwidth consumption. Please see the pricing FAQ for details on how multiple POP3 accounts affect your bandwidth consumption.

No, there is no such thing as a mailbox "quota" at PrismEmail. Quotas limit the amount of mail that may reside in your mailbox and refuse to let you download more mail until you delete old email. Since PrismEmail only downloads your email when you download your email from us this is not an issue with our service. Your email program will automatically delete the email from our server as soon as it is downloaded.

Yes, you can. You may add PrismEmail to your "Mail Accounts" at Yahoo by going to "Mail Options -> Mail Accounts -> Add". You will be prompted for an account name, which can be anything (like "PrismEmail"). In the following screen you should enter prismemail.com as "Mail Server", your PrismEmail username for "Username", and your PrismEmail password for "Password". Then, when you login to your Yahoo account you will be able to view your mail on the web. PrismEmail will download and filter your mail from your POP3 account and Yahoo will download only the filtered email from PrismEmail to Yahoo. IMPORTANT: If you use Yahoo, or any other web interface, to view your PrismEmail it is important that your standard email client download your email from PrismEmail within 10 days--thereafter, PrismEmail will purge the email from the PrismEmail server even if you haven't downloaded it to your email client. But using Yahoo in this fashion is a convenient way to view your filtered email from work, etc. and then download the email with your email client when you get home.

You can, but we don't recommend it. PrismEmail works best when it receives both good email and spam. If your email is first filtered through SpamAssassin then much of the spam will never reach PrismEmail and this means it won't "learn" as quickly what you consider to be spam. If you choose to use SpamAssassin along with PrismEmail be sure that SpamAssassin only inserts headers. It should not modify the actual message content. Some SpamAssassin configurations appear to actually modify the content of the message so that it is "visible" to the user--this makes it impossible to decode messages that have been intentionally encoded by spammers using Base64 encoding.