Well, I canceled AOL. I was on there since 1994 and I have to give them credit since they had the Straight Dope before the internet.
Anyway, that is done and I am wondering what is the best free email service?
I’d like a few things, I guess.
Reasonable storage size.
Can be used by Microsoft Outlook, if possible.
I don’t know. Just tell me what you guys think is best.
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myrealbox.com is the best one I found. No spam - and they are very anti spam.
They allow pop3, imap and web send/rec and 10 mb of space.
Hotmail is crap due to the quantity of spam they send - they only way I can use my hotmail account is to set it to exclusive and only allow certain addresses through.
I just started using evilemail.com for web-based email; they also have POP3 access. You can sign up for an email address under any of their doman names (mine’s under “killtheclown.com”).
One I’ve used that allows POP3 access and provides a lot of storage space is; operamail.com
It’s from the same group that provide the Opera browser, just in case you thought you were going to end up at a very odd email provider!
**k2dave[/n], Hotmail works for some people–like me–who get maybe one piece of junk email every couple of months, so I wouldn’t dismiss it so easily. I believe, but I’m not sure, that it’s the only one that can be used with OE.
Yahoo! Mail is probably your best bet. It offers a larger mailbox than Hotmail and is part of a reliable company. Smaller email providers just aren’t reliable any more–if you want the address to last I would be very wary of any company offering gimmicky names that isn’t affiliated to a larger provider. In the last year three of my webmail accounts have closed or switched to pay-only.
Damn coding.
I second k2dave. I’ve used MyRealBox since Yahoo disabled free pop3 access. Stupid name, great service.
** Crusoe ** I’m glad to see that you have good luck with hotmail but I know I’m not alone in the complaint. How long have you had your hotmail account? Mine was chugging along quite nicely till one day when the MS spam man came and never left.
It would be interesting to see what would happen if I were to drop the filter after about 6 months.
And as stated above Yahoo disabled it’s free pop3 access.
myrealbox is part of a large company, IIRC novell but you can find out for yourself by checking out the site. They claim they use the mail service to test things like servers and the like and I had the email account for what is at least 1.5 years - I don’t think they are going anywhere soon.
All mail services that use pop3 or imap4 can be used with OE, O or any standard email program (even for the palm OS).
Since you didn’t ask:
pop3 lets your computer handle the mail - the server basically hands the mail to your computer and lets it do whatever it wants with it.
with imap4 mail is handled on the server and what you see is basically a sync’ed copy of the mail on the server. Messages are not DL’ed to your computer until you click on them.
Both pop3 and imap4 can be set to act somewhat like eachother.
I personally like pop3 because mail is downloaded all at once and I can read it offline and since the mail is sent directly to my computer, frees the space on the server. Also pop3 rules can be set in OE while imap rules have to be set at the server and usually not as complete. One final reason that I prefer pop3 is the mail can go into a general inbox. With imap 4 you get a seperate inbox, trash, outbox, ect. for every account - some may like this but I don’t.
YMMV
For webmail mailed systems nothing touches Yahoo.com, its better than hotmail by miles, and much more likely to be around in a few years than the smaller providers (motto: here today, porn portal tomorrow :rolleyes: ).
Does POP3 for a few bucks a year too. Just won PC World best web email award. Good enough that I would pay for it if I had too.
Im using activatormail.com for net email. 2 megs, free, no ADS, no spam no viruses. They scan
the crap out of all incoming email like crazy. I have not got one spam or virus since using it.
has other cool features too.
Apologies, k2dave, I forgot Yahoo! was now charging for POP access.
I’ve been consistently lucky with Hotmail, from the sound of it. I opened one account in 1996 (or possibly 1997) and had no spam until I made the mistake of leaving my address unencoded in a Usenet archive. My own problem, really, and this was before the junk mail filter. The second Hotmail address I’ve had gets maybe one piece of junk mail a month, and I’ve had it for a year or two now.
I’ve never had any junk mail at my Yahoo account, nor at my PostMaster (http://www.postmaster.co.uk/) account. The worst offenders for me is my Orange account–free on signing up to the Orange mobile network in the UK and never used, but still full of junk mail.