What is a good easy to use ISP?

[J Miller]

We've been with OutdoorsUnlimited for 14 years. Started with them because they are or were a pro-gun ISP.

They have changed things so much that their email service usually crashes every other Saturday morning and they don't get around to fixing it till Monday.
And now they have initiated some kind of email censor that requires tremendous time and effort to go and unlock the emails you want.
We've told them we do not like it and asked how to turn it off. All we have received back is snarky replies and sarcasm.
Time to move to somewhere else.

Who is a good, easy to use, acquire, and reasonably inexpensive ISP with unlimited dial up time?

Since they don't care how we feel, perhaps they'll care when they loose our business.

Joe

[Blaine]

I used these guys for awhile several years ago... For what it was, it was ok if you need dial up....
http://www.juno.com/

[Hagler]

Joe,

http://www.earthlink.net

I have been with them for about 14 years. If you don't want to use their software, to connect to the 'net, then you can set up & use a "network connection" to get there. They have Web-based e-mail, and you can download it to your Outlook prpgram, or whatever you have on your home computer. Erathlink has many of the same kinds of things that other ISPs have, but Earthlink's "news" & other pages have a lot less junk on them. When you choose to view the "print" mode of a story, you really get just the text of that article.

Shawn

[Griff]

I was with earthlink for years... until we had a phone system crash... I was on their DSL service... and they kept saying that it was MaBell's fault that I couldn't get DSL back... and AT&T said there was nothing wrong with the phones... which I had to agree with... as ours worked as well as before or maybe better... Anyway, after 3 weeks of this back 'n forth, I asked what AT&T charged for DSL... $10/month cheaper than earthlink... guess what happened? I had DSL thru sbcglobal that afternoon.

Everything's been peachy since. I don't know how much DSL costs over regular dial-up... but IMO, it's worth every penny.

[Grizz]

who is the local service provider? your current account should or could have some storage space associated with it, and could allow email service which you could download with thunderbird or outlook or some such. you may already be paying for it. it's pretty routine and normal hereabouts.

Grizz

[KWK]

If your only gripe with your current ISP is their e-mail, why not get a web based e-mail account such as Yahoo, Google, or HotMail?

My account has been with Yahoo for about 15 years, most of that time with their premium, ad-free service. They've been having some trouble of late as they rewrite their services, to make it more modern.

Google works fine; my wife uses it. They will sniff your e-mail to try to better target ads, but that doesn't bother me. Unlike the basic Yahoo e-mail, it has no ads on the pages in which your e-mail is presented.

I used HotMail before Yahoo. It became popular faster than their service could expand, and I switched. I'd be surprised if it wasn't decent now. I don't know about ads there.

I haven't had dial-up for over 10 years, so I can't provide solid information about the available ISP services. Curious about them, I looked around a bit. TOAST.net sounds good; they've been around a long while and provide automatic data compression between their servers and your PC--which should be a big help at dial up speeds.

I don't know if your current ISP uses accelerated/compressed dial-up transmission. If it doesn't, you might consider the cellular based wireless systems, such as toast.net offers. Their 1 GB/month service is equivalent to about 2 hr/day of continuous dial-up transmission and is only about twice as expensive as dial-up. Used with a browser with add-ons to block ads, videos, etc, this would be enough data for many needs.

Looking a bit further, I see the Opera browser offers acceleration/compression; this could be used with any dial-up service not offering it. Were you to use a wireless service, this mode could effectively increase your monthly data allowance, but you can no longer force it to be On all the time.