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04 Oct 21 - 03:13 PM (#4121824) Subject: BS: TECH: A good email provider From: Rapparee Whereas our current email provider will no longer provide email service after December 1, 2021*, and Whereas we must find a new one, and Whereas we are almost certainly switching from coax to fiber for our ISP connection, THEREFORE I am asking which email provider you feel is best, and why. Oh, yeah -- we're in the United States (Idaho). Given our current company (Sparklight) it's probably because of the price of stamps. |
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04 Oct 21 - 04:44 PM (#4121840) Subject: RE: BS: TECH: A good email provider From: Joe Offer I suppose all sorts of bad things can be said about Microsoft, but the fact of the matter is that it's always going to be here. I got my Microsoft Network email address in 1996, and I still have it. Now the Microsoft email is live.com - but my msn.com email address still works. So does hotmail, another company Microsoft swallowed up. -Joe- |
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04 Oct 21 - 04:49 PM (#4121842) Subject: RE: BS: TECH: A good email provider From: Jeri I got Gmail as an alternative email provider that I could "throw away", but now, its my primary provider, and I really like it. |
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05 Oct 21 - 12:29 PM (#4121931) Subject: RE: BS: TECH: A good email provider From: pattyClink Fastmail is very good, an independent provider. Costs $50 a year, but no surveillance of your mail, no ads, lots of storage, and you can create tons of 'alias' email addresses if you don't want every little list and vendor to have your real one. I had to bail out of a long-term Yahoo address when they admitted they were going to monitor and analyze my 'private' mail content. And I just don't want to feed the Google surveillance state, either. |
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05 Oct 21 - 02:10 PM (#4121937) Subject: RE: BS: TECH: A good email provider From: Stilly River Sage Gmail lets you download your account(s) email into a program on the computer (though they protest about security several times a year.) I use Mozilla Thunderbird on my computer and have it all download (not IMAP, that just transfers some of it over but it isn't saved in the computer). I used to use Yahoo but they charged for the same thing, though they do have a good setup for email. I have a Microsoft account, but rarely use it. My university (retired) has an account I use for secure stuff, but they scan for account numbers and social security numbers and will give you a big scold if you send VISA accounts (the whole thing) or other information like that. My Internet provider has email but I have no idea how secure Spectrum's email is supposed to be. From PC Magazine: The Best Email Encryption Services for 2021 Want the whole world reading your emails? No? Then you should encrypt them to protect your privacy. The encryption services we've tested can help keep snoops out of your messages. This offers a good discussion of the types of features you might want to consider in your email account. Of those listed here ProtonMail is the one I have heard about most often. |
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06 Oct 21 - 11:53 AM (#4122067) Subject: RE: BS: TECH: A good email provider From: leeneia I use Outlook every day and G-mail once in a while. Both work well. Computer programs became more confusing in general when the industry decided to "go international" and substitute symbols for words. For example, they removed the word "Menu" and replaced it with a set of little lines. They removed the word "People" and replaced it with a silhouette of two heads. Then, being the people they are, they moved those important symbols to the most obscure corner they could find. One trick to mastering a new program is to find and explore those symbols. In Outlook, the print command is hidden under three tiny dots. Cute! |
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08 Oct 21 - 02:43 AM (#4122235) Subject: RE: BS: TECH: A good email provider From: Mr Red Choosing an e-mail provider is best not tied to your broadband provider. I have counselled several naive users over the years not to lock in to their phone provider because they may choose to swap. And did they listen? Nah. It is the same if you change your bank or credit card. There are all those contacts that are hooked to the conduit. Contacts you need in a year's time who don't know your e-mail address now. cf companies who get paid by credit card automatically and you rely on like breakdown insurance. You forgot about that one didn't you? Didn't I? |
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08 Oct 21 - 03:24 AM (#4122244) Subject: RE: BS: TECH: A good email provider From: DaveRo There's also something to be said for changing your personal email address every decade or so. I can still access the email account I got with my FreeUK dial-up account in the late '90s. It's still being spammed. |
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08 Oct 21 - 09:01 PM (#4122351) Subject: RE: BS: TECH: A good email provider From: Rapparee My wife chose for us: gmail. I spent over seven hours yesterday getting her Thunderbird setup to work with gmail and getting her email from our old ISP (yes, we're getting a different one with fiber optic lines) to work with the new email. One good thing is that I haven't had spam, etc. mail in the last 24 hours or so. |
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08 Oct 21 - 09:24 PM (#4122352) Subject: RE: BS: TECH: A good email provider From: Stilly River Sage I really like Thunderbird. I have about six different email accounts that load there, all POP, not IMAP. I have rules in place for sorting mail when it comes in (there are advertisers I don't want to cancel but they fill up the regular mail, like JOANN Stores. Create a rule telling those posts to sort to that sub-folder, it's done.) That said, Gmail has a lot of interesting functionality on the website, but I go in periodically and sort and dump most if it. Since I have copies on my computer I prefer to store it there. Who knows what else Google is doing when it crawls your email folder with various algorithms for spam and such. |
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09 Oct 21 - 04:00 AM (#4122366) Subject: RE: BS: TECH: A good email provider From: DaveRo Gmail is a good choice if you use Thunderbird. It's so ubiquitous (can you have degrees of ubiquity?) that the T'bird team will ensure that it keeps working (on IMAP, anyway) whatever changes Google introduce. Recently they've made signin more difficult secure. Gmail does have some particular features which a Thunderbird user should beware of. If you use local folders you need to be aware that gmail does not have folders, it maps them to labels. Moving an email in Thunderbird into local folder 'foo' adds the label 'foo' which you'll see if you use the web interface or the gmail app. Deleting email in Thunderbird moves it to Trash, and deleting it from Trash makes it vanish - from Thunderbird. But it's still in gmail - you'll find it in 'All mail' in the web interface. You can delete it there if you want to. All that applies if you use IMAP. If you still use POP then I'll assume you know what you're doing. A new version of Thunderbird, 91, is currently being - slowly - rolled out. |
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09 Oct 21 - 08:45 AM (#4122395) Subject: RE: BS: TECH: A good email provider From: Sandra in Sydney my main email address was with my first provider c.2002, & I also use thunderbird When I changed ISPs last year I paid a few dollars to keep my old address. I also have 2 gmail addresses, one where I am just a first name that can be either male or female, so I can be relatively anon on forums or lists etc, the other is for a folk club. I've been deleting irrelevant/personal stuff from the club address for when I eventually hand it over to someone else, or I pop off the twig unexpectedly & someone has to take it over! so DaveRo's comment got me thinking. But it's still in gmail - you'll find it in 'All mail' in the web interface. You can delete it there if you want to. I use folders & have been deleting useless stuff & FWD then deleting useful stuff from the original & sent folders - will I still have copies hiding somewhere? sandra (not a techy person) |
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09 Oct 21 - 10:42 AM (#4122407) Subject: RE: BS: TECH: A good email provider From: DaveRo There was a recent thread about deleting mail in gmail in the alt.comp.software.thunderbird usenet group. I can't find a web archive of it to link to, so I'll quote the relevant posts. The thread was "question about moving msgs to local folder for Gmail account" started on 2021-09-12 16:40 (UT+1, probably) OP: I have an account with Gmail that I typically access only via Thunderbird. I am using IMAP. I do understand the Gmail concept of labels rather than folders. In Thunderbird, when I look at the account, it shows 32 messages in the Inbox and 140 messages in Trash. For the first time in a long time I logged into the account via the Gmail web interface and saw 32 messages in Inbox and 140 in Trash. However, there were also over 10,000 messages in All Mail... Post by VanguardLH: All Mail is a history or archive folder. It contains all the e-mail you have ever sent or ever received. All messages are in the All Mail folder. Deleting a message from a folder merely has Gmail remove the label for that folder, but does not delete the message from the All Mail archive. Deleting from All Mail (if your client subscribes to that "folder") is useless: the messages will reappear. If you don't want to keep messages around other than those you overtly keep, clean the All Mail folder; however, deleting them using a local e-mail client has them reappear in the All Mail folder. Use their webmail client. Alas, EVERY message is linked to the All Mail folder, so when you clean it then you lose all your messages in every folder. You have to select which messages to move from All Mail to Trash (and then purge Trash). You can use the Starred feature in their webmail client. Star those messages you want to keep. Probably easier to go to other folders to star the messages there instead of hunting for them in the mess in the All Mail folder. Go to the All Mail folder, and use "-is:starred" in the search field to find all unstarred messages. Select all the unstarred messages, and delete them (move to Trash). Afterward, in the All Mail folder, search on "is:starred" and unstar all the retained messages (so you can use this trick again later). Some e-mail client subscribe to the All Mail folder, some don't. If yours does, you could trash all messages in the All Mail folder, and then purge the Trash folder to permanently delete the messages, but you'll lose all messages in every folder (All Mail is an archive for all messages regardless of what other labels were assigned to the messages). The Star feature won't be available in your local e-mail client to let you use that trick to retain messages, because you won't be able to do the -is:starred search in the All Mail folder. In a local e-mail client, you have to come up with whatever scheme it can provide for you to select all messages in the All Mail folder except those you want to keep (that are shown in other folders, like Inbox, Sent, etc), delete those messages from All Mail to move them to Trash, and purge the Trash folder to permanently delete those messages. All messages in All Mail consume storage quota. All messages in the Trash folder consume storage quota. When you select a message (using their webmail client), the action is just called Delete, because that action moves the message (adds a label) into the Trash folder, so it is still in your account. When you select messages in the Trash folder, the option becomes Delete Forever, because the messages get permanently deleted from your account (they will disappear from All Mail). Because all/archived messages stay in All Mail, you could end up consuming all your Gmail storage quota while all your other folders look empty or have few messages. Only deleting messages from the Trash folder has them removed from the server. The 42-post thead also talks about how gmail handles POP. If you want to read it, well, Thunderbird still handles usernet. Get a free account from Eternal September. |
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09 Oct 21 - 12:32 PM (#4122423) Subject: RE: BS: TECH: A good email provider From: Stilly River Sage Skipping past the long description, I chose, when I set up Thunderbird, to leave the messages in place on Gmail. It was a simple radio button to toggle, as I recall. I could have chosen to have Gmail delete them once they were downloaded. I haven't gone back to alter that setting, but it would mean less cleanup periodically. This way Gmail is its own backup. |
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09 Oct 21 - 03:39 PM (#4122442) Subject: RE: BS: TECH: A good email provider From: JHW Wish I knew one. I first used Hotmail, now called Outlook. (not express) Also have Yahoo which I use mainly being least worst. Outlook is very slow. Both used to be far better but they clog them up with stuff you don't need. Yahoo was far handier several versions ago. Who knows, they may make it so awkward I have to go back to Hotmail/Outlook. e.g. There's a black banner appeared at the top of Yahoo this week and I'm hoping it will dissapear. Have a Gmail too but no idea of password so no way in. Found it very cumbersome so never used but may be different now. |
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09 Oct 21 - 06:09 PM (#4122452) Subject: RE: BS: TECH: A good email provider From: Mr Red I used Office Outlook. Just the thought of my e-mails sitting on the server for any hacker to rifle through them. POP3 of course. But then I don't e-mail from Tablets or phones etc. |