Way OT- Email service

[ceb]

I finially took the plunge and went to a wireless internet connection. My dial-up was just to slow and unreliable and even though I'm still out of work, my wife absolutly needs the computer for her business. So when I discontinue dial-up I'll lose my e-mail. Do any of you have any recomendations on a e-mail service. Yahoo....etc etc.

[deerwhacker444]

I've been on yahoo for years and like it. I've noticed alot of people using gmail from Google.

[AJMD429]

Not relative to a specific service, but this is useful advice a computer-geek friend of mine had:

Get a permanent, hard-to-guess email that you don't give out at ALL, or maybe only to one or two family members. They need to be people who don'd "cc" you stuff or use your email in the text of a message like saying "sam@dognet.com" but instead saying emails like "samdognet" with an "@" after the "m" and ".net" afterwards. It will keep your spam to a minimum.

Get some 'disposable' email(s) with easier to remember names that you give to others. Use one for business, one for family, and one for all the 'junk' forms you have to fill out. Put them on automatic forward (which you can cancel at any time) to your main 'secret' email, except the 'junk' one which you can inspect once a month or so in case something actually important goes there.

When the 'disposable' ones get too much junk or spam, you can simply delete them and get new ones, without actually having to change your primary one.

[Kansas Ed]

There are some email (internet services) out there which won't let you use an email client like Outlook, or Thunderbird. Avoid those at all cost, since they are only web based (IE: forced advertising), and won't let you transfer your email to your hard drive easily. I recently ran into this with my mothers computer, so I ended up setting her up with a Gmail account, so she can use her Outlook program. That will save you some grief in the future.

Ed

[DavidF]

+1 for gmail. Sign up for a couple accounts, so you have one for all the junk.

[homefront]

Stay away from Yahoo mail.
They are horrifically liberal, and full pro Obama junk and ads.

I've also been having trouble there recently; my computer has locked up with the hard drive going nuts on several occasions after logging in. Unfortunately, it's my first e-mail account. I've had it for years and it's full of stuff I need to go in and retrieve.

G-mail uses word cues from the text of your e-mail to dig up and show you ads relating to whatever you're talking about. I don't like or trust that, either.

[Kansas Ed]

Stay away from Yahoo mail.
They are horrifically liberal, and full pro Obama junk and ads.

I've also been having trouble there recently; my computer has locked up with the hard drive going nuts on several occasions after logging in. Unfortunately, it's my first e-mail account. I've had it for years and it's full of stuff I need to go in and retrieve.

G-mail uses word cues from the text of your e-mail to dig up and show you ads relating to whatever you're talking about. I don't like or trust that, either.

That's exactly why you need to use an email application. This one, while somewhat different than the MS ones, has done us pretty well, and is a Mozilla product.

http://www.mozillamessaging.com/en-US/thunderbird/

Ed

[bsaride]

I use earthlink webmail and have for years with no problem.

FWIW gmail will strip attachments if they are the wrong file extension
so you may want to look at that depending on what the wife sends
as file types (I am a CAD designer and email files al the time, mostly
converted to pdf).

[ceb]

Thanks for all the replys so far, I'll check some out. Still looking for ideas, I'm paid through the end of the month, so have so time to make a decision.