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As promised, I’m following up on my previous Alien Camel post to report a new feature they’ve introduced to their iPhone-optimized email service.

One of the most interesting and unique features about Alien Camel’s service is its Pending Email list. This works rather like call screening on your answering machine. Alien Camel presents you with a list of all email it thinks might be dubious and offers you choices to process them — without having to download what possibly might be dangerous or annoying stuff.

This is really a brilliant idea I think, the ability to handle suspicious mail without having to, well, actually deal with it.

Alien Camel take suspicious email and categorizes it for you into "likely good" and "likely spam" groups. The likely good category is highlighted green. It shows you the address and subject of the email, allowing you options to whitelist the contact, go ahead and download the email for receipt and reading, mark the email as spam, or delete it outright.

The likely spam category, highlighted in red, offers the same 4 choices. So you can easily cruise through a bunch of emails, marking them as appropriate, and then deal with then all at once by tapping the "process" button.  Process dispatches all the email in the Pending folder to whatever fate you’ve chosen for each one.

This Pending email feature has long been a hallmark of Alien Camel’s
approach to email. Today they rolled it out in an iPhone-compatible
screen, making it even easier to use. To receive the iPhone optimized
version of the Pending list, all a user has to do is select iPhone as
the email format in the Pending Advisory settings.

I just find this a great way to breeze down a list of email and
clean up my inbox without work or second thought. Much better than my
other email accounts.

So while the Alien Camel iPhone trial is new, I’m happy to report
that Alien Camel is really seriously thinking about how to improve the
usability of email for our favorite device! Again, it’s going to be
very interesting to see what other innovations the folks at AC will
offer iPhone users as time goes on.