What do I want in my in-box? Only my e-mail, naturally. The OnlyMyEmail Personal service is devoted to realizing that dream. With your subscription (a very reasonable $3 per month) you get an e-mail account at Onlymyemail.com and the ability to filter up to three POP or IMAP accounts. There's nothing to install: The OnlyMyEmail servers filter out spam, viruses, and other unwanted messages, and pass along the valid e-mail. Your existing e-mail client requires only minimal reconfiguration; the site supplies specific instructions to configure Outlook, Outlook Express, and Eudora. You can also use the service to consolidate your accounts, accessing them via Web mail or any POP3 client.

Because unwanted mail never reaches your computer, downloading mail is speedy. You get a daily summary of blocked messages, for the very rare instance when a valid message gets blocked. Blocked messages remain available at OnlyMyEmail.com for seven days. Each is flagged by type (spam, virus, fraud, and so on) and you can configure your preferences to allow or block specific types. For example, if you never sign up for Listservs or newsletters, you can add them to the blocked types. Other categories include direct marketing that may not be spam, mail from foreign domains, pointless alerts generated by viruses, and messages from addresses on your blocked list.

OnlyMyEmail also includes an option to whitelist or blacklist specific addresses or domains. Because it's not specific to any e-mail client, there's no provision for importing the client's address book.

OnlyMyEmail claims it almost never flags valid messages as spam, and our testing bore out this claim. It blocked exactly one valid message—bettered only by Outlook alone, which blocked no valid mail (but let two-thirds of the spam into the in-box). It might have done better had we trained it on the initial 10,000 messages; however, this was impractical because blocked messages are accessible only through the Web site. Even without training, its accuracy was outstanding, with less than 0.5 percent of spam reaching the in-box. And, as noted, downloading mail was very fast.

Some might worry about security, given that all e-mail passes through the OnlyMyEmail servers. For safety, incoming e-mail messages are broken down into database records and stored on a server with no direct connection to the Internet. Valid messages are deleted as soon as you download them; blocked messages are deleted after seven days. So unless you suspect OnlyMyEmail of chicanery, there's little need to worry.

OnlyMyEmail Personal is a near-ideal solution to the spam problem. It handily becomes our newest Editors' Choice in the category, joining Cloudmark SafetyBar 4.0, MailFrontier Desktop 4.0, and Qurb 2.0; which is right for you depends on your working style. Qurb is a pure whitelist product, which is less than ideal if you routinely get desirable e-mail from people you don't know. MailFrontier combines filtering with a challenge/response model; the latter may be off-putting to business users, who don't want potential customers or clients to have to jump through hoops to reach them. Cloudmark has very good accuracy (though not as good as OnlyMyEmail), but has no support for Web-based e-mail.

OnlyMyEmail, meanwhile, works with any e-mail client, and it's among the most accurate we've seen. It will filter multiple e-mail accounts and optionally consolidate them for Web or POP3 access. And the monthly fee is hardly more than you'd pay for a fancy coffee.