For my Father. He had been using MSN, but continues to have problems. He has been off of it for a good year now. And can’t get through their support tree, and the accents of the support group is probably tough too. It’s hard getting older. Hearing and such. I have the same problems.
I think that he should just set up a new account. Somewhere else. As far as I know, he really doesn’t have anything in his address book. So that’s not a problem.
He uses Opera, and maybe FireFox. The machine is XP Pro. Norton is his security.
The only free service I use is Hotmail, and I wouldn’t particularly recommend it. Slow uploads, more ads than I’d like, and occasional reliability issues. I used it for years with no major problems, but now it’s only my junkmail account. It’s not bad, but it’s not great either.
I’ve used Hotmail years ago, as well as several little-known ones. Most of the time, I used ISP-based email through a client - and I will never go back to that. I know some people don’t like Gmail, but having used it for two or three years, I love it. It’s damned near perfect. The days of clearing out a hundred and fifty spam mails each morning - and thinking of it as normal - seem like a strange, distant memory now.
I’m on Hughes (DIRECWAY sat system) and they really clean out the spam. My Dad was getting hundreds of emails a day, and I could not really wrap my mind around that. It also has to do with his surfing habits, I suspect.
I use excite personally. I’ve had the same excite.com email address for over 10 years now, and I have maybe 10 - 15 spam messages a day. Easy to keep up with and they have an option for marking a message as spam and giving them feedback. I’ve used another email at excite for my SD login account and I’ve had that for going on 8 years…same thing…maybe 4 or 5 emails a day of spam. I suspect that people that get such large volumes of spam must be signing up for crap someplace. My surfing habits at home aren’t always…innocent…and I rarely have an issue.
Gmail all the way, it’s replaced all my other email accounts as my primary email. Catches every single spam email ahead of time, and can be used through a normal email client or a web browser. Also, integrates with Google Talk for easy chatting when 75% of my friends also use Gmail.
Another vote for Gmail. It’s great for when I have to be away from home (and the PC-based mail prog) for any extended length of time. That feature of Gmail logging into your other email accounts and downloading them so you have online access and the spam doesn’t strangle things is a boon. It isn’t my main email service, but it’s a close second.