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View Full Version : Hotmail, Gmail or something else



moribashi
August 10th, 2012, 06:43 AM
So - I can't decide which service to use. Both have pluses and minuses. I kinda like Hotmails new look, but is it good idea to use Hotmail on Linux, because it is ment for using on windows (integration with windows 8, skydrive utility so on). Things I don't like about Gmail is that it has privacy issues and it works best with Android phones. I had Galaxy S and I have to say that I won't buy another android phone soon. I am happy with Nokia E5 at the moment.

My need is e-mail service. I don't care that much about anything else. What are your thoughts?

lisati
August 10th, 2012, 07:09 AM
Of the free email services I've tried over the years, gmail would be one of my preferred options. These days, however, I run my own email system, because there are options for knocking spam on the head that aren't as easily available using another provider.

Primefalcon
August 10th, 2012, 07:11 AM
I'd say gmail, hotmail is kinda viewed as the spammer domain for a start

mastablasta
August 10th, 2012, 08:08 AM
hotmail got renamed and will get even more integrated with windows.


I had Galaxy S and I have to say that I won't buy another android phone soon.

i once had a red hat linux.... it was in 97. doens't mean i will never have any linux again.

i mean how can you judge latest Android and phones (such as S3) by using one of its first versions as comparison?

Primefalcon
August 10th, 2012, 08:19 AM
Oh and outlook.com (the new hotmail), does not feature IMAP support, Gmail does

KiwiNZ
August 10th, 2012, 08:29 AM
Gmail, hotmail is a spam nightmare

vasa1
August 10th, 2012, 08:36 AM
... Things I don't like about Gmail is that it has privacy issues ...
Like ?

Mikeb85
August 10th, 2012, 08:37 AM
Hotmail is constantly getting hacked/spammed... Worst Email service ever. Go with Gmail...

Bachstelze
August 10th, 2012, 10:23 AM
If those two are your only choices, Gmail is by far the lesser of two evils. Generally my advice to "average" users is to use the free email address provided by your ISP (if it does provide one). Unlike Google, your ISP has an incentive to not mess up: if they do you can go to the competitor.

moribashi
August 10th, 2012, 10:30 AM
Thank You for response. Talking about Gmail privacy - for me the issue is scanning my personal mail. I just don't feel comfortable with it.

I also have found interesting providers - Lavabit & Zoho. As I can understand Zoho allows free mail hosting with my own domain for three users. Do you have any experience with Lavabit or Zoho?

mastablasta
August 10th, 2012, 10:46 AM
Thank You for response. Talking about Gmail privacy - for me the issue is scanning my personal mail. I just don't feel comfortable with it.


meh it's not like broswing the net with Http is not getting scanned. let's not even start various facebooks and such...

google only scans for words in your email so they can show the right adds (or at leats the best fit. it's how they get the money and keep their excelent service free for you.

Grenage
August 10th, 2012, 10:49 AM
Gmail here. I'm a big webmail fan, due to it being ISP-agnostic; gmail has been rock solid for me. Gmail scanning is automated - no employees read your mail... (lol, imagine the manpower requirements).

If you want a tailored service with guaranteed privacy, pony up and also use encryption.

vasa1
August 10th, 2012, 10:49 AM
... for me the issue is scanning my personal mail. I just don't feel comfortable with it.
...
How is that "scanning" done? Do they have employees who read our mails and open our attachments?

Lightstar
August 10th, 2012, 11:33 AM
I've been using both for many years.
I got a lot more spam on hotmail, so gradually hotmail has become my email address that I use to subscribe to websites. I got maybe 2-3 emails considered spam in my Gmail account in the last year, so gmail has become my personal email for friends and family.

Personally I like gmail better for my android phone, linux notification widget (there is some for windows as well - even more so if you use Chrome browser). However I do wish it used folders like hotmail does.

Primefalcon
August 10th, 2012, 11:51 AM
I do wish it used folders like hotmail does.
why? Tags offer anything the folders do and more

Dragonbite
August 10th, 2012, 02:07 PM
I use both.. one for personal and one for professional communications.

From an email perspective the biggest difference I find is IMAP (Gmail) vs POP (Hotmail/Live/Outlook).

If you are using a web interface for email only, I would give some points to Gmail for their feature of being able to open more files in the browser without having to download the files first.

If you get a lot of Office documents from people, Hotmail provides opening Word, Excel and PowerPoint files in the browser with more compatibility but the editor features may be slightly limited.

Neither Google's Drive or SkyDrive are available for Linux though there are some 3rd party projects (Insync (http://www.webupd8.org/2012/08/insync-google-drive-client-for-linux.html) and Grive (http://www.webupd8.org/2012/05/grive-open-source-google-drive-client.html)) for Google Drive currently, while SkyDrive was once mountable as a network drive but hasn't been lately. I think Gnome 3.6's online accounts include access to SkyDrive files just like they do Google documents.

I actually get very little spam in either, and more with Google over Live but I also use Google more than Live.

One nice feature with Hotmail/Live/Outlook is the ability to use "Alias". So you can have multiple addresses that are delivered to the one mail location. Plus, if people see your alias and not your actual email address, they cannot use that to try and get into your account. Only your actual email address gets you into the account.

So you could have "robert@outlook.com" as your account name, but only use "bob@outlook.com" alias for all email correspondences. If somebody tries to "break into" your account they would likely use "bob@outlook.com" and it won't work, only "robert@outlook.com" has access.

If you use any Windows (7+) or OS X, I guess, there are some additions that make Live Mail or Outlook better integrate with the Hotmail account but if you don't use those applications, then they are no benefit.

The Hotmail account also spends extra effort connecting with your Facebook and LinkedIn accounts. This enables all of your contacts to be in one contact list and the option to send them an email or write on the wall right in the contact card. I'm just glad I can "link" the contacts so I have one entry for so-and-so, with the combined information.

Outside of the email features, it depends on if you are going to use Google Docs/Office Online, collaborate, Office 2010, file synchronization, etc.

Like I said, I use both. I do like the interface of Outlook.com over Hotmail/Live older interface and initially the Contacts page was not updated but it is now. I am hoping that they give a facelift to SkyDrive and Calendar soon.

ADDITION:
Gmail tags are great because multiple tags can be set on any single email and when you search in specific tags they will show up. Hotmail uses Categories and likewise can have multiple ones associated with any particular email.

Points go to Gmail which can nest the tags too, so I may have a "family" tag, and under that have "family/school" for school related items, or "family/wife" for things my wife sends me.

Both can include rules to set Tags/Categories to emails as they come in.

Frogs Hair
August 10th, 2012, 02:33 PM
I have been very happy with GMX for my personal email . I still have a Hotmail account and they have become much better at filtering spam at least for me . I don't think the Hotmail account has much much of a future though. :o

Paqman
August 10th, 2012, 02:34 PM
Talking about Gmail privacy - for me the issue is scanning my personal mail. I just don't feel comfortable with it.


It's automated scanning of your mail, it's not read by a human. It's no different to the Google (or Yahoo, or Bing) spiders that scan everything on the public internet, including your posts here.

vexorian
August 10th, 2012, 02:46 PM
Thank You for response. Talking about Gmail privacy - for me the issue is scanning my personal mail. I just don't feel comfortable with it.

I also have found interesting providers - Lavabit & Zoho. As I can understand Zoho allows free mail hosting with my own domain for three users. Do you have any experience with Lavabit or Zoho?
It is scanning your personal mail, for use in stuff that is shown to you.

Hotmail and microsoft services have a worse privacy policy than google's, you know... ( marketingland.com/no-you-dont-need-to-fear-the-google-privacy-changes-a-reality-check-5194 ) . I think google is at least transparent and announces the changes when done. Meanwhile, Microsoft prefers to be hypocritical, making adverts about how google is against your privacy while doing exactly the same.

mike acker
August 10th, 2012, 04:51 PM
So - I can't decide which service to use.[snip]

My need is e-mail service. I don't care that much about anything else. What are your thoughts?

goto CoreComm and get you own domain. it includes your own private e/mail addresses and works like a charm. plus: you'll like their privacy statement.

moribashi
August 11th, 2012, 09:28 AM
Thank You for all the responses. It seems that i will stick with Gmail, although I really like the idea of Lavabit service. I also got mail-address firstname@lavabit.com, but somehow I am afraid that this service isn't so reliable that I could use it as my main address - even if i pay for it. I read about Lavabit from internet and it seems that a lot of people are very happy with it but there are also some who have had problems and seen some outages abd the service seems more like as-is. It seems to me that Gmail is more reliable than some smaller provider. Or what do you think?

catlover2
August 11th, 2012, 09:44 AM
I have been using two "Personal" Lavabit accounts for some time now and don't have any complaints. If you care about webmail, their interface is very minimal/simple. (This could be good or bad.) I only access it with Thunderbird, so that doesn't matter to me anyhow.

moribashi
August 11th, 2012, 09:48 AM
I have been using two "Personal" Lavabit accounts for some time now and don't have any complaints. If you care about webmail, their interface is very minimal/simple. (This could be good or bad.) I only access it with Thunderbird, so that doesn't matter to me anyhow.


Do you have paid or free account? I don't care about webmail also, because I use Thunderbird anyway.

lisati
August 11th, 2012, 10:14 AM
Generally my advice to "average" users is to use the free email address provided by your ISP (if it does provide one).
For me, that would mean using Yahoo, to whom my ISP changed from msn a few years back. No thanks. I'll stick with my own server for now.

BigCityCat
August 11th, 2012, 03:40 PM
I use all of them. My hotmail account gives me 25 gigs of online storage with skydrive because I am grandfathered in. My private email is only for business.

Redache
August 11th, 2012, 04:31 PM
I use my own personal domain for e-mail as I can just keep renewing the domain and the registrar I use has Mail servers setup automatically. I also have a Gmail that I'm planning to get rid of as soon as I can ensure that no e-mail goes there that I care about (it's mostly stuff I don't care about now). I also have an iCloud e-mail account that I use on my Macs/iOS devices and that tends to be things that I don't want other human beings to know about since it isn't one I want to share.

cyberhood
August 11th, 2012, 06:48 PM
Things I don't like about Gmail is that it has privacy issues and it works best with Android phones.
Both Google® and Microsoft® don't care at all about your privacy.

Lavabit works fine. Other secure webmail serivces you might look into:
RiseUp.net: https://riseup.net/en
CounterMail.com: https://countermail.com/
HushMail.com: https://www.hushmail.com/
Mailoo.org: https://www.mailoo.org/
autistici.org: http://www.autistici.org/en/services/mail.html

I2P-Bote Secure Email Plugin: http://i2pbote.net/index.html

Also, read up on PGP (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pretty_Good_Privacy).

SeijiSensei
August 11th, 2012, 07:30 PM
Unless they've made major changes in the new Hotmail it, along with Yahoo and AOL, are vulnerable to account hijacking (http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?p=12086711). The method required is trivial; you can even watch a how-to video on YouTube. Follow that link for details.

I know someone (http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2011/11/hacked/8673/) who had her GMail account hijacked, but it appears less common.

catlover2
August 11th, 2012, 11:56 PM
Do you have paid or free account? I don't care about webmail also, because I use Thunderbird anyway.

I have a free account. Note that this means a small two-line text advertisement is attached to the bottom of every incoming message. It's very unobtrusive, but you have to remember to remove it if you're replying to someone else's email.

mike acker
August 12th, 2012, 01:59 PM
Both Google® and Microsoft® don't care at all about your privacy.

[snip] Other secure webmail serivces you might look into:

Also, read up on PGP (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pretty_Good_Privacy).

IMHO(FWIW) the "Big Boys" in the computer business see software as a market research tool.

This is one of the main reasons I am very interested in OpenSource, Linux, and such. PGP enthusiasists have long argued that if there were a back-door or other vulnerability in PGP that it would be discovered and reported -- because PGP -- now GnuPG (after PGP was grabbed up by Viacrypt, Network assosiates ... ) is "open source" : i.e. we all get to inspect/compile the source code

this makes sense to me

it is my intention to move my computing activities entirely to Linux/ open source . so i expect to hang around here quite a bit :-)

kurt18947
August 12th, 2012, 03:47 PM
I have been using two "Personal" Lavabit accounts for some time now and don't have any complaints. If you care about webmail, their interface is very minimal/simple. (This could be good or bad.) I only access it with Thunderbird, so that doesn't matter to me anyhow.

This is my experience with Lavabit as well. The webmail interface is ... minimal. Thunderbird 'knows' Lavabit's settings, just enter user name and password and you're in business. I've had no availability issues in the year or so I've been using it.

t0p
August 12th, 2012, 04:28 PM
For my main, day-to-day stuff, I use Gmail. Lotsa storage, and handy little widgets and thingamies.

I also have an email account that came with my free (actually 5 euros) shell account on a BSD-running server somewhere or other. I don't use it much, even though it has a handy webmail interface - too little storage. IMHO Gmail blows everything else out of the water. Unless you want to pay for an account somewhere... and Gmail is just as good as some/most/all paid services I know of.

As for privacy issues - all email has problems there. I once read somewhere that you shouldn't write an email containing anything you wouldn't feel comfortable writing on a postcard. Maybe things aren't quite that bad; but if you really are concerned about privacy, use GPG or some other encryption utility.

Jay MC
August 12th, 2012, 04:54 PM
I wish there was an Ubuntu webmail :)

My main webmail account isn't with any of the major providers - the domain is my friend's website.

I did like Gmail, but I try to avoid Google web services because I keep forgetting to log myself out. For some reason, I just feel suddenly exposed when I'm Googling away quite happily, and then notice "You are logged in as..." in the top right hand corner of the screen.

For a similar reason, I don't like widespread Facebook integration (e.g., I'm reading an article and it tells me how many of my friends liked it, or invites me to comment as myself).

I don't even like it when I've left myself logged into Wordpress, and visit a site that turns out to be Wordpress-powered and knows who I am!

Paranoid, I know...

moribashi
August 13th, 2012, 06:20 AM
It is so create to see so many responses. I have to say I have tried several different solutions meanwhile. I have tried:
- Gmail
- Hotmail (Outlook.com)
- Lavabit
- Zoho with my own domain.

My favorites at the moment are Outlook.com and Zoho. I like outlook.com mainly because new web interface is really really easy to use, there are folders and labels (instead Gmails-s labels), I can creat aliases as much as I want and as I am old hotmail account owner I have 25 GB skydrive also. Unfortunately my only concerns are that microsoft products won't integrate with linux and they never will and they donät have IMAP access...

About Zoho - they have actually very good offer. You can have your own domain hosted on their server and you can create i think 3 different mail adresses with 5 GB storage limit. They also have IMAP and POP access. And... IT is all free. Can it really be? Is anyone else using this? I am a littlebit worryed if zoho is reliable and might it be company that one day just closes free servicese?

I used a way back zenbe.com mail adress and one day they just decided to close the service... it was a bitty news.

What do you think - outlook.com or zoho with my own domain? :)

Dragonbite
August 13th, 2012, 01:45 PM
The 25 GB of SkyDrive space (and the cheapest rates to increase that, $0.50/GB/Yr) has been addictive. I wish I could integrate Linux with that, or an official Google Drive since it is the 2nd cheapest location ($0.60/GB/Yr).

jemadux
August 13th, 2012, 07:39 PM
i use gmail but i got and something else

moribashi
August 14th, 2012, 11:49 AM
I have a feeling that I have found my solution. It is Zoho mail with my own domain. It seams reasonable, web interface is also very good and it has IMAP access. :)

PaulInBHC
August 15th, 2012, 02:29 PM
I started with AOL on dial up in the 90s. Added a hotmail account later. Used an account from my isp for a few years then switched from phone to cable, lost the account and had trouble with forums and such that had my defunct address for the forgot my password feature.

With the talk of MS switching hotmail to Outlook.com I decided to type outlook.com in my url window. I was told that I was now converted over. No choice, it was done.