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Naturally, fellow freakz, I was intrigued at the iPhone trial offered by the Alien Camel email service when I saw it. So, I applied and was fortunate enough to be accepted the same day.

Alien Camel is an Australian provider located in Melbourne, using data centers in the USA and Germany. Relying on a mix of technologies, they double-scan email for viruses, and implement high-caliber Bayesian statistics to sniff out spam, as well as their own patented approaches.

The Camel folks claim to offer one of the safest, most spam-free email services around. And they do it with the type of email known as IMAP.

Since my "normal" email account I’d been using on iPhone was a standard POP account, I was extremely interested to enjoy the benefits of IMAP.

Let me step back here. Now just because you have an iPhone doesn’t necessarily mean you’re a connoisseur when it comes to understanding the fine differences between email types. So what is the main benefit of IMAP as opposed to POP email for most people?

And the short answer is: all your email’s always there, safely sitting on the server when you need it.

I think many users can relate to one of my most nagging email
problems — I frequently need to reference a certain email only to
realize that I’ve downloaded it onto the one device I don’t
have with me at that very moment! So I have inconsistent copies of my
inbox scattered about. This can happen with POP email. 

IMAP email however keeps all everything on the server, so no matter
when or where from you look at your mail, you can see it all as it is
in one state. Even after you’ve synchronized and downloaded it all to
our favorite device to read on the subway.

The automatic synchronization is a nice feature; delete it one
place, and it’s deleted everywhere. You always have the same view of
your email! There’s no more of this "oh i have a copy of that at home
on the laptop. . ."

And since Alien Camel offers unlimited storage, you don’t have to
worry about the size of all that email over time. You can keep it all
forever.

I’ve been using AlienCamel for a couple of days now and here are my
early impressions of the service on the iPhone. Most importantly,
AlienCamel is very easy to set up.

Alien Camel has some interesting folder features, as well,
especially in the way it handles mailing lists. When you tell Alien
Camel’s webmail interface in Safari about a mailing list address, you
can tap that address to automagically create a folder for that mailing
list.

This is a neat feature that should keep your inbox tidy, for those of you interested in productivity ideas like Inbox Zero.
However, when combined with the other new folders Alien Camel
automatically creates — Deleted Items, Pending, Sent, Spam, and a
second (maybe unnecessary) Trash — the folder list can extend beyond
one screen, necessitating scrolling.

Thus when setting up these folders on iPhone you should take moment
to consider how much scrolling you want to do. On the other hand, a
reasonably tidy filing system has many advantages, as any GTD advocate will tell you!

I thought Alien Camel would route all your mailing list email to
that folder, making storage and filtering a snap. But so far that
hasn’t been my experience; my mailing list email so far today has
arrived in my general inbox. I’ve had to move it by tapping it to open,
tapping the folder icon on the bottom bar to display the folder list
and then tapping the folder to select it and move the email.

Alien Camel has other neat features too, like its unique Pending
Email processing, which I’ll take about in a follow-up post in a few
days time. . .the biggest downside I’ve found so far is that there
doesn’t seem to be a way to search your email by date.

So far Alien Camel has been a very pleasant experience. They seem to
have good support too, and have answered all my emailed questions with
surprising promptness. Since this is still a trial, it will be
interesting to see how Alien Camel develops its service for iPhone over
time.