Best Email Providers

[dwlpl]

Now for the latest in my 'Best of' questions.

As you may deduce I am not happy with my BT Broadband service, or to be more accurate the help desk/call centre experience.

Now if I am to change ISP I presume I will have to give up my @btinternet.com extension.

Given this to be correct what reliable non ISP dependant email providers are there so I can keep email addresses even if I change ISP's on more than one occasion?

[zoink]

gmail is a strong candidate for non ISP dependent Email providers..

www.gmail.com (http://www.gmail.com)

or any of the old favourites like hotmail, yahoo etc..

another way to do it would be to register your own domain name e.g

dwlpl.com

and purchase some hosting to enable you to have a personal email account e.g. [email protected] cost per year could be as little as £20 and is much more personalised than a hotmail/yahoo account

[mdc]

Or look at a email forwarding service such as Bigfoot (http://www.bigfoot.com/ef/en/infopage.jsp?show=forwarding.default), so you can keep one email address and simply change the forwarding address when you change ISP's

[el !]

fastmail.fm, without a doubt. I've been with them more than a year now and is absolutely superb.

Two things:
- look at their blog and the clarity and completness of information presented about system status. Is't clear that they care about realiable email and it shows.
- the web interface is fantastic! So good in fact that I'm think of dropping my super-sophisticated imap client for it.

There is a reward program but I won't be so cheap to ask you put my email as you subscribe.

[frostbite]

Freenetname provide a 'Justmail' service @£20 p.a. and, as the name suggests, you get to choose your own domain name which they register for you as part of the package.

[asuweb]

Gmail deffinately wins hands down for me. I've been using it for well over 2 years and can safely say it is the best email service I've ever used, and I've used a lot.

Gmail has excellent spam filters compared to some other popular free email services, I very rarely have to remove spam from my inbox. Also, very generous space allowances, so no problems there.

As always, Gmail invites are avaliable for anyone who wants one. Just PM me with an email addy to send it to.

[IO540]

I use http://www.virtualnames.co.uk for both private and business, and they have been superb for a few years now.

They do email redirection, with optional spam filtering, domain sales and hosting, and if you run your own www/email server they also offer a DNS-only service (which is great).

A few tips if I may:

Spam filtering does not work! I can write you an email which your spam filter will dump, on word analysis alone. It won't contain any filth, but it will fall foul of some word frequency analyser. I have totally abandoned spam filtering because I cannot afford to lose a single business email.

For extreme cases of spam, like me getting 1000+/day at work, there are more intelligent solutions, like a challenge-based whitelist system (which some outfits also provide, or you can implement the open source TMDA one which I use).

Step 1: Register a domain name. Say your name is Ronald Reagan. Register reagan.co.uk. It's dirt cheap. Or reagan2006.co.uk if the former is taken, etc etc.

Step 2: Get somebody like Virtualnames to host it, and redirect any emails sent to it to your real ISP's mailbox (nobody needs to know what that is and you can change it anytime; all you have to do is update the redirection at VN).

You now have unlimited email addresses of the form

[email protected]
[email protected]
[email protected]
[email protected]

etc

So, when you go to some new website which asks for an email address, make one up on the spot

[email protected]

Then if they sell it to a spammer, you can set up a spam filter on it.

That way, you get a lifetime email address, and you can keep ahead of spam.

Configure the From: header in your email program to your normal email address i.e. [email protected] (some ISPs like Freeserve did not allow this, which is really sh*t but there are few if any of those today).

The other really great thing about the above is this:

Let's say you sign up with Ebay. For them, use an address like

[email protected]

and for Paypal, use

[email protected]

Then if you get a phishing scam from somebody pretending to be Paypal, addressed to anything other than [email protected] you know right away it is scam.

Spam filters don't work. Loads of people write emails in a manner which causes it to be misclassified as spam. Loads of people get blacklisted; this can happen in various ways (even a whole ISP can get blacklisted) and once e.g. spamcop blacklists you you are stuffed because lots of people will suddenly never see your emails. Lots of email vanishes due to this.

[Saab Dastard]

IO,

That's a very helpful post - nice one!

:ok:

Thanks,

SD

[stickyb]

Another word of warning.
I have recently been doing some business with a perfectly reputable chain of Estate Agents in the UK, but they complained that every time they tried to email me the email bounced.

Tracking down the cause revealed that their email was hosted by clara.net, but because someone (not them) has used a clara.net account to send out spam, my ISP has clara.net on one of its blacklists, so all email from anyone on a clara.net server gets bounced. Not good for business.

[IO540]

Clara are idiots.

My business used to be with them. Then, one day the connection went. I made some phone calls and Clara said they disconnected it, due to an allegation of copyright infringement with P2P, referring to P2P traffic a month previously.

Setting aside whether the allegation was true ;) I asked him who it came from. He said he can't say due to the data protection act.

I asked what evidence they ask for; reply was "any complaint".

I asked how was the complaint delivered; reply was "email".

I asked why did they not contact me first. Reply was "our terms and conditions don't require us to" (actually that is true for just about every ISP).

I asked "does this mean I could send you a forged email, pretending to be from say Microsoft, alleging that one of your large business customers [of which Clara has a fair number] has been found to have some P2P traffic on which a Microsoft product was downloaded/shared, and you would summarily, without notice or any communication, disconnect their internet service?" Reply was "Yes".

:yuk:

Decent ISPs, e.g. Zen, first send an email back to the complainant (which is nearly always an automatically generated email BTW) asking them for evidence of the alleged copyright infringement. Nearly always, this evidence is never delivered (I have this from the horse's mouth). Many ISPs, including BT Internet I am told, get so many of these emails they just ignore them.

ISPs that cut off what they call abuse invariably do it to keep down traffic. Not a lot of people know this but the standard flat-rate products are not backed by a flat rate deal from BT. In general terms, the ISP has to pay for the bandwidth in specific chunks, and has to pay for the # of concurrent connections, so him selling flat rate deals is a business bet on not picking up too many users who use too much bandwidth.

Back to the original topic, it is amazingly common for a whole big ISP to be blacklisted. What happens is that the ISP gets inundated with phone calls from irate customers whose emails are not reaching their destinations, and somebody with hopefully more than 2 braincells realises they got blacklisted, so they contact Spamcop (and others) and sort it out, usually within a day or two. But a small ISP, or one in a 3rd world country (e.g. anywhere in Latin America, the Far East, etc) could be blacklisted for weeks or longer. A lot of smaller American ISPs are blacklisted almost continuously.

But the biggest reason for "lost emails" is the destination's spam filtering. In fact most internet users don't even know their email provider / corporate email system is doing spam filtering. This can take many forms. For example one contact I once had, in a big London bank, would never get an email whose text (this was a plain text email without any attachments) contained the string ".exe".

Can't beat fax :)

[BLUE SKY THINKER]

Nothing I can really add to my two responses on this subject

HERE (http://www.pprune.org/forums/showthread.php?t=221094)