Best Email? (I need to escape)

[Scarath]

Hi
I have had a hotmail account now for longer than I can remember, long story short i want to change to another free email provider but i'm not sure which.

So can anyone recommend a good one?

Heres a few things i'm looking for:

Internet based or outlook type, i dont mind.
I dont want to use Gmail cos they read ur email
I dont want yahoo (tried it years ago)
i'd like to use evolution mail but i guess you need a server or something to use that?

I'd quite like to sync all my email services together too much i'll have to find the right tool for the job first.

thanks in advance

[slimdog360]

I dont want to use Gmail cos they read ur email

I think you're going a bit over board there. I have a gmail account which I forward most of my other emails too, then use icedove as an email reader thingy.

[CouchMaster]

Whats wrong with your ISP? I know that they give you two or three when you sign up...

[Scarath]

I think you're going a bit over board there. I have a gmail account which I forward most of my other emails too, then use icedove as an email reader thingy.
overboard eh? well maybe i believe those you_tube videos too much, are Gmail anygood then? I know you can use Gmail through evolution.
From what you said, can you get hotmail live to forward all emails to Gmail then?


Whats wrong with your ISP? I know that they give you two or three when you sign up...
1) I dont know how long they will be my ISP
2) i to keep an email address for a long time and dont wanna have to tell all my contacts the new one when/if i change ISP.

If i say anything dumb excuse me, for as long as i have been floating around the net i am still a n00b when it come to email services teehee

[Joeb454]

have you actually seen or tried yahoo's new mail service? it's quite good.

Though I have to admit I'm a gmail user, and I love it :) Though Yahoo's interface look's nicer

[Scarath]

have you actually seen or tried yahoo's new mail service? it's quite good.

Though I have to admit I'm a gmail user, and I love it :) Though Yahoo's interface look's nicer

Not the new one, but yahoo and hotmail always used to be pretty similar so i figures the new yahoo would just be a hotmail-live clone.

I may check out Gmail and hope the conspiracy theorists are wrong ...:)

[YoG%*@]

hi,

gmail user here, too =)

to answer your question:


From what you said, can you get hotmail live to forward all emails to Gmail then?

from the gmail help page:


You can fetch mail from your other email accounts. You'll be able to read email from up to five additional accounts, all in one place, [...]
The email accounts you’d like to fetch must support POP access and, in the case of Gmail accounts, have POP access enabled.

hth,
mux

[AlanRogers]

I dont want to use Gmail cos they read ur emailI'd vote GMail too; I've been using it for years as my spam-trap account. I have one or two proper IMAP address but I use different email addresses for everything I sign up to, which all forward to the GMail account.

Whilst I understand your concern, I have to dismiss it as FUD. GMail are no worse than Hotmail or Yahoo; they don't read your mail but they do serve up focussed advertising based on the content of the email you're reading.

That can be achieved easily using Google functionality, which they make available to all free of charge. Of the three, I'd say that Microsoft/MSN/Hotmail have commited far more heinous crimes.

[Scarath]

Gmail is it then, i'll see if i can get my hotmail sent there in the short term then cut loose of it.

Thanks

[hkgonra]

Get your own domain and use google apps at your domain .
I have set it up for 8 different companies now and they all love it.

[helliewm]

Sounds like you need IMAP try www.fastmail.fm. There is also www.inbox.com.

Helen

[Scarath]

Change of heart - Im going with fastmail.fm

they have lots of @domain things to choose from (i got a ftml.net), you can send you other email through it (POP) and its free.

I would have gone with Gmail but for 2 reasons

1) they didnt have the email i wanted (some other bugger got it) teehee

2)@googlemail is long winded

3a) i may be just paranoid but when a thread on a friendly forum provokes private messages warning me off googlemail, it made me do some quick research into the google reading ur email matter. Scary.

3b) Maybe its all tosh and maybe its not but i'd rather not have the worry. I mean im sure if someone wanted to read my emails so badly then they could no matter what service i was using but some of the things u read about google storing ur mail isnt nice.

I believe strongly in the right to privacy for everyone so ... blah not the thread for rambling.

anyway thanks again for the advice, i'll see how fastmail.fm goes

[helliewm]

Fastmail is excellent I have used them for about 4 years now.

Helen

[cyclefiend2000]

anyone else interested in importing hotmail messages into your gmail account... i found this site that will do just that for you...
http://v3.izymail.com/gmailconfig.aspx

i signed up a few days ago, and have been getting my hotmail sent to my gmail account since. works pretty well.

[KCPokes]

Get your own domain and use google apps at your domain .
I have set it up for 8 different companies now and they all love it.

+1 for this. All the free email accounts are fine, here and there, and as long as it is only for personal use. I'd much rather just have my own domain and go from there. If this was for business it would be a no-brainer; nothing looks worse, IMHO, then to see a business contact have a hotmail, gmail, or yahoo email address.

[fedex1993]

I am use gmail i think i have like 3 accounts for it. If you dont want people reading your mail like google then you can use GPG and PGP keys to encrpyt your messages.

[daynah]

(deleted)

[BobCFC]

I use gmail, and I moved my family to it too.

The great thing about it is it's a Google acccount not just a gmail account. I can access Google Reader for RSS, Notebook, Docs, Calander, Blogger etc all from a single Google account.

Can I also recommend CustomizeGoogle plugin for Firefox from the mozilla addons.... You can tick a box to hide the adds in Gmail and main Google search page etc. This means you get more screen space!!

Oh yes there is another firefox addon called GSpace that lets you upload files to your account like a backup hard disk... I have about 6gb free in my account to this is cool. I believe you can mount your gmail account like a filesystem in linux using Fuse or something. How about copying a file to /mnt/gmail to back it up!

There are also gmail programs in synaptic.. I use checkgmail which is an icon that sits in the notification area and checks for new mail.


EDIT: about the Google reading your mail thing,.. ever use the spell check? Same thing. It's software that performs lexical analysis. Computers can't understand semantics yet. Or did you think humans actually read it lol?

[Lostincyberspace]

If you don't want to use @googlemail.com the just sign up as @gmail.com maybe from the us it doesn't really matter.

[PrimoTurbo]

There is no one that actually reads your email at gmail, no physical person that is. The system scans your email and gives ads based on the topic.

[Scarath]

So... what super secret things are you doing that's so bad that you can't have gmail reading your mail?

That is the sort of attitude will allow society to fall into a police state. People say they dont mind because they have 'nothing to hide', i find it unbelievable that privacy is not an issue to some people.

Whether you have nothing or everything to hide privacy s still your human right.

[Nekiruhs]

That is the sort of attitude will allow society to fall into a police state. People say they dont mind because they have 'nothing to hide', i find it unbelievable that privacy is not an issue to some people.

Whether you have nothing or everything to hide privacy s still your human right.
I guarantee you that Hotmail and most other mail providers do the same thing. At least Google tells you and tells you that its only used to target ads in their AdSense ads.

[BobCFC]

Emails sent to somename@gmail.com and somename@googlemail.com reach the same inbox.

Also some.name@gmail.com and somename@gmail.com and s.omename@gmail.com.

[forrestcupp]

The common estimate of the number of Gmail users is 50 million. In October of 2007 the Radicati Group estimated that in 2006 there were 183 billion emails sent per day, total not just Gmail.

Do you really think that we need to worry that a group of people are sitting in Google cubicles reading our emails? If you're doing something through email that a computer system would think is important enough to filter out and send to a human that could read it and do something about it, you deserve to get caught.

I use Gmail and send it to Thunderbird so I don't even have to worry about the advertisements anyway.

[koleoptero]

I have email accounts all over the net and use all of them for various reasons.

[Malcolm]

I'm not sure why most people seem to think that you have to be a criminal to be concerned about your privacy.

I'm not a criminal, and yet I don't like my email provider doing any kind of indexing of my email. It's obvious that Google don't have a team of email readers, I don't think anyone believes that. But the fact that this invasion of your privacy is only statistical and automatic doesn't mean you shouldn't be concerned about it. That's your data, it's private and personal, and it's still YOURS when Google uses it for commercial purposes. Saying that MSN and Yahoo do the same thing doesn't make me feel any better about it.

GMail is cool and innovative in many ways, and for a long time it attracted people in a very subtle way making them feel part of some kind of elite (I have hundreds of invites left, for the record), obtaining free access to their personal data in exchange for an amount of disk space no normal user would ever fill.

I'm not overly concerned, but I do believe we should always be more careful and wary of what companies offer "for free".
Be at least aware that you are paying them.

[AndyCooll]

Emails sent to somename@gmail.com and somename@googlemail.com reach the same inbox.

Also some.name@gmail.com and somename@gmail.com and s.omename@gmail.com.


Yeah, I was going to point this out, and the fact that GMail has IMAP.

:cool:

[finferflu]

As said by other people, with GMail at least you know they're using your private information. So if you accept that, it's not a breach of your privacy, it's more like an agreement: you accept them to index your personal data, and in exchange receive the service. I think that's how it works with most free services. I don't know if there's any "open source" email account that is provided only for the sake of helping the community. Surely Google is looking to its own interests, but among all the big companies it seems the only one helping out Open Source so much.
I think it does that because of its marketing strategy, pointing towards innovation more than anything else, but it still helps us.
I don't like big companies myself, but so far Google seems to actually deserve all the money it has made, unlike.. ahem... Microsoft, for example.
I use Gmail because I find it an excellent service, I know it's using my personal data, but it's not different from Hotmail and Yahoo, I keep getting the same spam :P
If you know of any "open source" service, I will surely move to it, but if I have to use a commercial one, I'll stick with GMail.

[Malcolm]

As said by other people, with GMail at least you know they're using your private information. So if you accept that, it's not a breach of your privacy, it's more like an agreement: you accept them to index your personal data, and in exchange receive the service.

This is exactly what I mean, it's good that you're aware of it and accept in exchange for the service. I myself have used GMail for a long time before becoming more worried about this (and other "issues" of Google's services). I just wanted to point out that privacy is important, not only for criminals - I've just learned to value it more than I used to. :)

[barbedsaber]

I use gmail, and thunderbird. It told me I need to enable pop or somthin on gmail, so I logged in, changed it and was fine, lovin thunderbird.

[vishzilla]

I recommend Gmail!!!

[forrestcupp]

I'm not a criminal, and yet I don't like my email provider doing any kind of indexing of my email.
It's not like it's indexing what you write or receive so that people can look it up on a google search. It's not even caching your emails. When you delete an email, they don't have any record at all of it anymore.

Whether you like the concept or not, it happens a lot on the net. Websites pay close attention to what you do on the net so they can personalize their advertisements. That's the way to do it to have the best chance of actually capitalizing on those ads.

[Kernel Sanders]

Gmail FTW!

http://mail.google.com/support/bin/answer.py?answer=6599&topic=12787

[icechen1]

Gmail,fastest ever

[slimdog360]

remember that you get hotmail to forward all emails to your gmail account and not have gmail try to fetch your hotmail emails. Gmail won't fetch them from hotmail.

[Mateo]

yeah, i understand the situation, i feel the same way. What I want is simple:

1) An email with IMAP, I'm not using browser-based readers, ever, period.
2) A non-goofy domain. I'm not giving out me@fastmail.fm, me@bluebottle.com, etc. to contacts. I'd like my email address to at least sound somewhat professional.

So far gmail fits best, but i'm still looking for a better solution.

[Scarath]

yeah, i understand the situation, i feel the same way. What I want is simple:

1) An email with IMAP, I'm not using browser-based readers, ever, period.
2) A non-goofy domain. I'm not giving out me@fastmail.fm, me@bluebottle.com, etc. to contacts. I'd like my email address to at least sound somewhat professional.

So far gmail fits best, but i'm still looking for a better solution.

Sorry for thisn00b question but like i said in one of my other posts im not up on email method:

What is the issue with IMAP? is it unsecure, looses data, etc?

Also fastmail have the domain @ftml.net which is ok i think, better than @hotmail or @jokingaround.com lol

[Mateo]

I've never heard that IMAP is unsecure or loses data, but i'm no email aficionado either.