I need a new email provider; Your suggestions please!

nbp · Apr 6, 2010

Hi guys,

For the past couple of years I have been using the email service through my university. However, I am graduating in May, :party:

and so need I to ditch my .edu mail account and set up a new email account. I'm a little bummed, as I really liked the layout of my school account.

There are so many different providers though, and I don't really know which one I want to use. My parents have a gmail account I set up for them, but I don't really like the interface. I find it kind of confusing and busy, plus I want folders!

What free email providers do the tech gurus here suggest? I want a quick and easy interface, ability to 'folderize' messages, and good spam and hacking protection. I don't need zillions of social networking options; even though I'm college aged, I don't use facebook, myspace, twitter or any of that other crap. (CPF is one of the few places online I spend any real time reading and posting.

)

Please make your case for your preferred provider! Thanks everyone. :grin2:

mrartillery · Apr 6, 2010

Ive had yahoo for over 10 years, I love it. My recommendation! :twothumbs

watt4 · Apr 6, 2010

get yourself a domain name

set it up with Microsoft's or Google's free email service for domain owners.

nbp · Apr 6, 2010

What is the benefit of doing it that way as opposed to using another provider?

KD5XB · Apr 6, 2010

Gmail gives you free POP3 access -- so you can set up your own Gmail account, and then use a program like Thunderbird to download your email, and use the filters available in Thunderbird to send posts to various email lists, etc., to whatever folder you wish. It's all free and lets you do what you're asking about.

nbp · Apr 6, 2010

KD5XB said:
KD5XB said:

Gmail gives you free POP3 access -- so you can set up your own Gmail account, and then use a program like Thunderbird to download your email, and use the filters available in Thunderbird to send posts to various email lists, etc., to whatever folder you wish. It's all free and lets you do what you're asking about.

Click to expand...

In doing this, are all my downloaded emails and sent mail stuck on whatever computer I install the program on? Or is it all still accessible via the web interface? The thing I like about a web based provider is that it's all accessible from anywhere on earth, and if my computer were to crash or something, I don't lose anything. What happens if I use Thunderbird?

KD5XB · Apr 6, 2010

I didn't realize you were only interested in web-based email, although with the setup I described you have BOTH. Your email is downloaded to your local computer, but Gmail retains it, albeit in the Archives box rather than the Inbox. I'm not sure, but I suspect that can be configured differently as well. I just always want my email on MY computer.

LightChaser · Apr 6, 2010

I use Gmail (both on gmail.com and my own domain) and connect with Mozilla Thunderbird via IMAP (as opposed to POP3).

Changes I make in Thunderbird (locally) like marking as read or deleting messages also show up in the online interface. I haven't tried making folders though, so you can try that yourself.

Both Gmail and Thunderbird are free, so all you're spending is time (and maybe some bandwidth and electricity).

Apollo Cree · Apr 7, 2010

Gmail is the answer.

You can use the web interface or POP3 or IMAP clients.

Thunderbird is the best mail client to use. You can configure Thunderbird with POP3 and leave the messages on the server and it works fine without deleting messages from the web interface.

IMAP is a better choice and does a better job of handling web+PC. It also allows you to access the mail folders from multiple PCs, e.g. home desktop, personal laptop, and work PC>

HarryN · Apr 7, 2010

+1 for IMAP. Frankly, POP mail is just plain obsolete, and for good reason.

IMAP allows you to sync to a client, or to other devices, and to your web mail. POP cannot do that AFAIK.

I use Opera as my client
- Partly because I like the interface
- Partly because it lets you do email and web browsing with one free software program
- Partly because there is less malware for it
- Mostly - because it will work with MAC, PC, and Linux, and we have all 3 in our house.

I am not a fan of the free email services, but there are many people that use them.

Ska-T · Apr 7, 2010

nbp said:
My parents have a gmail account I set up for them, but I don't really like the interface. I find it kind of confusing and busy, plus I want folders!

Gmail has something that is more flexible than folders. You can apply "labels" to a message. A label is a way to categorize messages similar to a folder, except that you can assign more than one label to a message. So, for example, you can label a message as "CPF" and also as "Thrower" and as "Online Purchases", etc. Makes searching easy and powerful. You can also make filters (with Boolean instructions if you like) to automatically assign filters.

I also like the way that an email ping ponged back and forth to the same person is kept together and shows the number of responses in the "from" line. When you open it the emails are tiled but only the last one is expanded.

You can archive your mail and it disappears from your inbox but you can retrieve it later by displaying all the archived mail, by clicking on a label, or by searching for content.

Lots of cool tweaks under Settings > Labs.

Popsiclestix · Apr 7, 2010

+1 for Gmail. IMAP if you use a non-browser client.

Chauncey Gardner · Apr 7, 2010

I use yahoo & gmail both.

Yahoo has lousy spam filters & I have to clean up the accounts more often than I like, but it's nice to have my email account displayed with securities portfolios you can edit, weather for any location you want to keep track of, customizable news etc... You can get everything at a glance by setting up your my yahoo page.

Google has a better email app in gmail by a bit if all you are looking for is email & no content. What I really do not like about it is them storing all your personal email, contacts and even reading your email content for marketing & advertising purposes. They store all this information & all correspondence & all internet searches forever. What was more disturbing was the ceo of google saying "no one should have a problem with that if they have nothing to hide".

Frankly I find it pretty creepy when my email provider starts marketing ag related products & ranch land property when I get an email from a friend who is a rancher. Another contact is a local college english teacher & I get "go back to school & get your degree" advertising when reading his. And I don't care if it's just done via algorithims or if it's the lizard like google ceo reading over my shoulder.
I don't see it being much different than my mail carrier reading my peronal correspondence, it's an invasion of privacy.

Anyone who uses gmail, take a look at the ads google runs while reading your messages.

At first I thought it was just coincidence, a little fact finding showed it was not.

The privacy issue & the fact that google has refused to rule out selling your personal infomation in the future (by IP address), has me rethinking using gmail, in spite of any advatages it offers the hard core email user.

Basically google is creepy but works very well. Yahoo email could stand some improvement but more than makes up for it with other features that go with the mail account.

.02 from a yahoo user for 10 years+ & gmail for about a year.

Ska-T · Apr 7, 2010

Chauncey Gardner said:
Anyone who uses gmail, take a look at the ads google runs while reading your messages.

If Google does what you say it does, and I have no reason to doubt you, then that is creepy.

I use FireFox and AdBlock Plus. I never see ads when using Gmail. Am I missing something?

HarryN · Apr 7, 2010

Ska-T said:
If Google does what you say it does, and I have no reason to doubt you, then that is creepy.

I use FireFox and AdBlock Plus. I never see ads when using Gmail. Am I missing something?

Hi - I guess people must not read what is well known about Gmail. It is free because their software does in fact read your emails and target adv. to you based on the content.

Either you are comfortable with that concept or you are not, which is why I won't use google for search, email, browser, and sure as heck, not my cell phone os. Not sure that this is still enough to keep them out of my personal business - probably not.

Benson · Apr 7, 2010

Google has all the obvious nominal policies in place about people (i.e. Google employees) not reading your mail, just their ad-serving algorithms which give you nominally "useful" and "on-topic" ads. I suppose some people find it creepy, I find it more amusing when the ads are a hilarious misunderstanding. (But then, as apparently something of an oddity among tech-savvy people, I'm largely immune to internet ads, and routinely browse without adblock to support sites I visit -- I figure if the extra bandwidth downloading the ads earns them a little money, why not?)

Of course, then there's the most recent noises about them providing the US government access to your mail, in the form of telling their employees to "be intentionally vague" about whether they provide such access. Disturbing, of course, but that side of things is guaranteed -- you can bet any US-based email provider is providing the US government some degree of access to your email. Don't like it? End-to-end encryption (good luck convincing most people to use encryption when replying to you!) or overseas providers (but can you trust them/their government any more?).

IMO, the reason Google catches so much flak is not that they're any more privacy-invading than most of the other options, but because they're both huge and self-proclaimedly non-evil. That paints a big bullseye on them any time they act just as evil as everyone else -- which is most of the time, oddly enough. While I'm not boycotting them, please don't take this as a criticism or disrrespect to those who have decided to. If you want to boycott them over it, by all means do so, just be wary of assuming that other alternatives are automatically better because you don't hear about them.

What I do? I don't want to spend the time and energy required to actually find a substantially more privacy-sound email provider, especially knowing that it will likely be less satisfying technically. So I stick with Gmail for my primary email account, and for web search.

But for software, as opposed to services, there's no reason you can't have the technical excellence and ditch the privacy invasions -- there's SRware Iron (essentially a sanitized version of Chrome) in the browser arena, and while I'm not aware of any projects for sanitizing Android (I prefer Maemo over Android -- more UNIX, less crippleware -- so I'm not at all keeping up with the Android world), it's my understanding that there's not all that much you can't tweak if you make sure your phone lets you flash custom OS images.

Chauncey Gardner · Apr 7, 2010

Ska-T said:
If Google does what you say it does, and I have no reason to doubt you, then that is creepy.

I use FireFox and AdBlock Plus. I never see ads when using Gmail. Am I missing something?

Check the ads to the side of your email.
Part of the time they are generic. Depending on whatever algorithm they are using to detected certain words / phrases, I notice the ads get adjusted to reflect either content OR they have data collected from the senders IP. Or both...

It took me a while to even notice it. Then I showed it to my s.o. & when it was happening & who the senders were.

She removed google completely from her computer after reading what they were up to doing & seeing the creepy stuff with the targeted advertising.

Chauncey Gardner · Apr 8, 2010

Yeah, sometimes the key words trigger some pretty funny stuff on the sidebar that makes me smile & shake my head too.

Nice to know my post was not greeted with a derisive comment about paranoia & others have picked up on it also.
The aspect that bothers me more is when ads are run without key word triggers, but apparently by data available to google from the senders IP profile.

The google ceo is also a political ally of the current administration in in DC, who is also collecting IP data from the web on posts on facebook or op/ed forums, newsites & twitter accounts & turning it over to a private data mining firm (& keeping thier own database further adds to the creepiness that seems to be increasing at google.

I am not registered to either party & don't have an axe to grind politically (both parties disgust me equally), but the use of private data & the resulting privacy invasions are starting to get bothersome.

I may not stop using gmail for business contacts, but I have started to use it much, much less & will not set up another account with them again after all the info out there that has come out.

It isn't about "not having anything to hide", and that is a pretty specious argument on the part of google & it's ceo (particularly after some of his dirty laundry was made public recently) to try to make.

More & more a lot of this stuff has an Orwellian stench to it.
ds

Benson said:
Google has all the obvious nominal policies in place about people (i.e. Google employees) not reading your mail, just their ad-serving algorithms which give you nominally "useful" and "on-topic" ads. I suppose some people find it creepy, I find it more amusing when the ads are a hilarious misunderstanding. (But then, as apparently something of an oddity among tech-savvy people, I'm largely immune to internet ads, and routinely browse without adblock to support sites I visit -- I figure if the extra bandwidth downloading the ads earns them a little money, why not?)

Of course, then there's the most recent noises about them providing the US government access to your mail, in the form of telling their employees to "be intentionally vague" about whether they provide such access. Disturbing, of course, but that side of things is guaranteed -- you can bet any US-based email provider is providing the US government some degree of access to your email. Don't like it? End-to-end encryption (good luck convincing most people to use encryption when replying to you!) or overseas providers (but can you trust them/their government any more?).

IMO, the reason Google catches so much flak is not that they're any more privacy-invading than most of the other options, but because they're both huge and self-proclaimedly non-evil. That paints a big bullseye on them any time they act just as evil as everyone else -- which is most of the time, oddly enough. While I'm not boycotting them, please don't take this as a criticism or disrrespect to those who have decided to. If you want to boycott them over it, by all means do so, just be wary of assuming that other alternatives are automatically better because you don't hear about them.

What I do? I don't want to spend the time and energy required to actually find a substantially more privacy-sound email provider, especially knowing that it will likely be less satisfying technically. So I stick with Gmail for my primary email account, and for web search.

But for software, as opposed to services, there's no reason you can't have the technical excellence and ditch the privacy invasions -- there's SRware Iron (essentially a sanitized version of Chrome) in the browser arena, and while I'm not aware of any projects for sanitizing Android (I prefer Maemo over Android -- more UNIX, less crippleware -- so I'm not at all keeping up with the Android world), it's my understanding that there's not all that much you can't tweak if you make sure your phone lets you flash custom OS images.

JB5 · Apr 8, 2010

I use yahoo and have for many years with no problems.. thought about changing to gmail but there is to much talk about stuff they do and I never hear anything about yahoo so I just stuck with what I have,, if it aint broke dont fix it.

nbp · Apr 12, 2010

I see a lot of support for Gmail here. I wish I liked it better, as then it would be a no brainer, I'd do that for sure. A few Yahoo fans as well. Not much love for anyone else. I don't send billions of emails, so I guess if Gmail is the best I can suffer through the lack of folders and the goofy threaded conversation feature. I can probably customize things a little bit for my tastes. The one good thing about gmail is the fact that the email app on my itouch is already set up for gmail and I've heard from friends with iphones that it is very functional. Maybe I'll crack and go that route.

I need a new email provider; Your suggestions please!

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