I asked upthread but no one commented - does it let you just put your Google Voice number? They give you a free phone number, so why not just give them that one?
Occasionally they ask for my phone number but I am always able to click past it. I am willing to be proved wrong but I think the wording just suggests you must provide it, not that you actually must. In any case, I have never given it and my service is just fine.
It seems most likely to me that who gets hit is probably random, depending on whether one of their robo-dialers is available at the moment you are logging in or signing up. Eventually it will hit everybody, but they can’t make a phone call to hundreds of millions of people all in one day.
As for buying a phone to throw away – phooey on that. I just canceled all my Google accounts; didn’t cost a thing and they didn’t even put up a fight. Turns out the Settings menu has an option to “Delete Account Close account and delete all services and info associated with it” Poof, just like that.
For those who don’t believe it or think we are mistaken … it is no mistake. You have just not been selected yet. You now MUST link all your Google activity and you now MUST give a valid phone number (which WILL receive a call) to open a new account … with the apparent exception that you might slide by if all their robo-callers are busy at the moment.
But when you are chosen, you MUST either comply or abandon your account. Once I received the message I was unable to access YouTube at all until I logged out of Google altogether. Even clicking on a youtube link from this forum only brought me back to the “You must link your YouTube account to your Google account to access your account.” No mistake and no other option except for the Sign Off button, which, by the way, was so far to the right side of the window I had to spread it out nearly full screen to even see it.
Even forgetting all about evil empire conspiracy theories and privacy concerns, right now this minute I can not access the data I uploaded there unless I comply with their demand for a phone number. A company that changes the rules in the middle of the game and won’t give me back my chips if I want to cash out is not a place I intend to do business with.
fastmail.fm is decent.
The Mailcan.com I mentioned upthread is one of the fastmail mail accounts.
For a few dollars a year, you can get a Yahoo Mail Plus account with SMTP and POP support. You can always let it revert back to a regular Yahoo Mail account if you don’t want to keep paying.
I have a lot of email addresses for various purposes. Some of them basically just for the hell of it. The fastmail.fm account is one of those. Because of this thread I started mucking about with this account again. The free account is not that great. There does not seem to be a good way of using that account for sending mail from my phone. You have to pay to get access to the smtp outgoing mail server for fastmail. That is OK sort of from home because you can use your ISPs server for sending mail but verizon shut down their smtp a while back. So I no longer think that fastmail is a decent free service.
needscoffee do you use the free service or one of the pay levels of service?
Free. It’s now basically my junk email account.