I use mailcan.com for one of my email addresses. It has the world’s worst interface. But it’s free.
mail.com has always been a bit crappy, but the good part used to be that they offered some pretty cool domain names, my favorite of which was “@scientist.com.” That was nice, but is unfortunately now gone. The website is still up, but your choices are now limited to domains like @email.com, @consultant.net, and the somewhat charming @cheerful.com.
So in answer to your question, if you don’t want to spring for CompuServe, or dig through old drawers to see if you have one of those AOL discs lying around, just go with Yahoo mail or something.
Is it just for new accounts? Because I have my old account, and so I don’t have to give a phone #. (I don’t use my gmail account much anyways – I only opened it for a second one, since my yahoo mail account had already been way too established when Gmail came around)
I used Hotmail/Live for a while as my alternate “give to online retailers so all the spam goes somewhere other than my regular email account”, before just opening a second gmail account instead. It’s not bad – their spam filters have gotten pretty decent.
And spam is really going to be your problem – filtering spam well is not a simple task, and I’m guessing only the biggest free webmail providers (Yahoo, Live, Gmail) are going to have the resources to do it at all well.
If you have an account but you’re worried about signing up with it because of spam, check out spamgourmet.com. You can create email addresses that will forward a specified number of emails to your account and then ignore all the rest. So you can register for things, respond to activation emails, and then not worry about spam from them.
Dear Flying Spaghetti Monster, you’re obtuse.
He stated the price he is unwilling to pay. Some people do have standards, and others, not so much.
Turble:
Hotmail/Live is really, really good. It’s rapidly becoming my main account.
As you said, Google hasn’t yet reached the “too expensive” point for me. However, the phone number thing is really fucking close.
Do you have any friends running servers under their own domains? You could ask if they have e-mail services and get in that way. It won’t have the super fancy GUI, but it’ll work with Outlook and the like.
Glad to see this got back on track. I thought this thread might be hopelessly trainwrecked.
Looks like hotmail might be the answer for now; the sign up was pretty unobtrusive and it went right into Thunderbird with no problems … although it won’t come as a big surprise to some of you that I am not a big fan of Microsoft either. 
The whole idea is spam control. I do a lot of shopping online and fairly often sign up for forums to ask a question or two in specialized areas. It’s just no fun to open my email program and get 112 spam messages in a day, so I just change addresses once the spam gets heavy.
I will grant that gmail has been pretty good at filtering spam but their heavy-handed way of simply locking me out of my account (with no warning and no opportunity to access the account to tidy up unfinished business) until I met their demand for information is unacceptable to me. It’s like you walk into the bank one day and they tell you you can’t access your account unless you get fingerprinted and provide a DNA sample … and you can’t withdraw your money unless you do so.
But I don’t want to rant; I just want to hear about alternatives. Thanks for your suggestions. I’d be happy to hear of any others.
You’re talking about the YouTube thing? I still don’t understand why you couldn’t have just made a dummy Gmail account to link to your old YouTube login, but it clearly triggered some personal boundary for you so I guess it doesn’t have to be logical.
I’ve used hotmail for over 10 years and think it’s fine. I only get maybe a dozen or so junk emails per day and I also do a lot of online shopping.
I signed up for two new Gmail accounts within the past month (both for YouTube.) Neither one required me to give them a phone number, or I wouldn’t have finished signing. I may have been asked for one after I’d already made the account, but I just ignored that screen and went to Gmail and logged in.
I still find the linked accounts frustrating, as videos and email aren’t related, and there actually is a very good reason to want to use more than one account on both. I hate having to open a new browser profile.
Anyways, assuming you still can’t get around the phone number issue, I’d reluctantly suggest Yahoo! Mail over Hotmail. Neither has anywhere near the quality of spam protection as Gmail, but Yahoo gives you a lot more options and doesn’t treat you like a baby every time you click on a link. I only use Hotmail because I use my gmail account to check it. Yahoo doesn’t have POP or SMTP support. You can only use their web application or Yahoo! Messenger unless you pay.
[spoiler]Though I don’t really see the point in getting a new email account if you are also no longer going to use YouTube. It’s not like your refusing to use your account is going to do anything: it doesn’t even tell Google why you’re upset, since the problem was with a different account.
The way to get Google to change is to contact them with your concerns. I did that about the lack of a “Related Videos” tab in the new YouTube interface, and they fixed it. I complained about how they treated TVTropes, and they apologized and implemented a new system. If there’s any Internet company that actually listens to complaints, it’s Google.
And, likely, if you did complain, they’d just tell you that it’s optional and how to get around it.[/spoiler]
When I tried to log in to my YouTube account, I got a page telling me that in order to access my YouTube account, I MUST link my YouTube account to my Google account.
There was a link to “Learn more” I think it said. That lead to a page suggesting that if I didn’t want to link my current YouTube and Google accounts, I could open a new Google account and link that to YouTube. Attempting to open a new Google account is where it demanded a phone number; no phone number, no new Google account.
This is apparently being rolled out gradually. I expect that eventually everybody will be subjected to it unless they meet resistance and cancel the plan.
I found some posts made around the net yesterday by people who had been locked out of their gmail accounts also … and some who had been denied access because there were “too many accounts already attached to that phone number.”
I was given no warning, no opportunity to go in and check for recent messages or to remove the videos I had uploaded … videos of me performing public domain classical music published in the 1800s, so no question of copyright infringement. No question of spam abuse or any other sort of problem – this is simply their new policy.
BigT This seems to be something they just started rolling out the past couple of days. You do present some sound reasoning.
That’s because they don’t have a good verification system, like requiring a working phone number.
The phone verification isn’t just so they can send you your password if you forget it. It’s to keep every Tom, Dick and Prince of Nigeria from signing up a million bogus accounts and sending spam, dirtying their IPs and making YOUR email undeliverable. That’s why it won’t let you use the same phone number for lots of addresses, either.
Don’t be pissed at Google. Be pissed at spammers.
Valid point, Zipper. Spam is a huge problem and a very difficult one to solve. But having been locked out of my account by Google once, I am simply no longer willing to put all my eggs in their basket, awaiting their next demand.
Hotmail/Live is very good and of course links into the whole Windows Live Services that I find very useful. The spam filters are good too.
I had no problem linking my youtube account to my google account, and was NOT asked for a phone #. Unless you’re saying that you wanted to open another account for youtube?
Well, if it bothers you that much, buy a cheap no-plan phone for $15.00, use that number to verify and then drop the phone in the nearest canal.
They demanded it of my daughter a couple of days ago, too. I tried to tell her that she must be mistaken; Google would never require you to link your youtube account and give them your phone number! I was wrong.
I was wondering when someone was going to buy a cheapo prepaid phone to do this. I’m surprised it happened so soon.
Weird. I just went and tried it and was able to sign up a new Gmail account without supplying a phone number. So I wonder what determines if they require it or not? Maybe just for IPs which are associated with more than a certain number of accounts to cut down on spamming? Geographical doesn’t make a lot of sense, but I guess that’s possible as well.
Are you sure you can’t opt out or click past it somehow? They’ve offered to let me link my phone to my Google account several times, but it was never mandatory.