OT: Best Free Email (POP Only)

Are you hosting through your ISP? If not they shouldn't be messing with your mail.

I have an unlimited hosting account with eboundhost.com and can do a million different things with my email. I can use spam filtering or not or redirect it through Google to act as a spam filter, which is what I do.

If you are looking for inexpensive hosting, I would be willing to give you a free account under my hosting. I already do this for a number of my friends. Check out coldwatersafety.org.

On Sat, 08 Nov 2014 09:19:18 -0700, Jim Thompson Gave us:

If you have an android type phone, you likely already have a gmail account. Perhaps that would facilitate a way to filter by source, thus making it easy for you to tell which are web site related. Especially if you do not actually already use the account. I do not know what filtration features it has. Likely varies from device to device.

Spend a few bucks a month and do it right.

Real helpful, John =D> Spend it where? ...Jim Thompson

Why POP? The only use of POP is in fetchmail scripts to then pass on the mail to a proper mailserver (as an alternative to setting up a mailserver that will receive the mail directly). POP is a hopeless choice if you are using a mail client - with normal setups, the single client pulls everything off the server. That means you can only connect one machine to the account, and when that machine fails or corrupts its mailfile, you have lost everything. (You can, in theory, leave mail undeleted on the server - but with POP that brings its own problems.)

I would /never/ recommend POP - use IMAP (or exchange, if you can't avoid it).

So with that in mind, you could do far worse than a gmail account - it is reliable, easy to use, works fine with IMAP, and has a workable web interface for when you need it.

On an ISP that has real customer support, and provides Spam Gauntlet.

SG quarantines and then deletes about 97% of my email, all the spam, with zero false positives and only a few marginal cases leaking through.

Ever hear of "mail.analog-innovations.com"? is so explain why it's not a good solution. if not you should definatily ask someone who knows about it.

it's already got a pop-3 server installed, you probably just need to setup the mailboxes not forward to your ISP and point your mail client at it.

POP works fine for me, with Thunderbird. Most of my PCs are set to "leave messages on server" and my main PC is set to "delete after 30 days".

I only keep one PC neat, with all my mail nicely sorted and trimmed. Now and then I copy the Tbird profiles from that one to all the messy satellites.

I back up Profiles daily to a terabyte USB drive.

free? I use google's gmail for this. so far not much spam makes it to the inbox. have set up for text only, which may help. Images are filled in ONLY if you request, otherwise I get a lot of boxes and text.

With a google account you can also get voice line/mail. VERY cheap international calls, like $0.02/min to Brazil vs ?? free domestic calls, anywhere. And the capability for voice to text conversion and then google voice sends you THAT voice message as an email. Good for record keeping.

for cheap? Call BasicISP.net

BasicISP.net (800) 456-3118 PO Box 511 Mount Vernon, OH 43050

EVERYTIME I call them I reach a US citizen/person who gives knowledgeable help. basic access on the order of $90/yr ?? so far NO spam makes it to my INBOX.

Only if you set it up wrong. Plus most mail hosting outfits let you turn that off at the server. Even Gmail.

You've got that exactly backwards. With POP, you can have N local copies of everything. I have email backups going back into the 1980s, from half a dozen email servers. Good luck doing that with IMAP.

I use Rackspace, which I'm pretty happy with. AFAICT they don't spy on my mail to sell me stuff, either. I also have them automatically forward all my mail to another separate hosting company, so that I automatically have failover.

Cheers

Phil Hobbs

I have gmail up and running... perfectly fine for my needs... circumvents Cox' spam filtering.

I _was_ running POP from Cox, now from gmail, no big deal. As for confusing copies, I don't have that problem... my son Aaron wrote me a handler that forwards to my cell when I'm traveling, replies go back thru my PC, then outbound... the PC does the housekeeping, filing everything in its appropriate mailbox/folder.

Of course I'm running the most modern Email client ever... Eudora Pro v7.1.0.9 (paid mode, so I still have all those nice filtering mechanisms operational >:-} ...Jim Thompson

I offered you hosting that would include all the email you want and someone else asked about the email you get with your hosted URL. Why do you feel the need for a third party email service? Why not use the email that is part of your web site hosting? I see you have email set up through snipped-for-privacy@analog-innovations.com. Why not use analog-innovations.com for all your email?

Shoot, I missed the most important part. I have been using Eudora for nearly 20 years now. Well, as long as I can remember anyway. Even though the bug fixes have stopped, bug additions are also absent and I think that is a more than fair tradeoff. If I start using Linux, I'm not sure what I will do. Maybe Eudora will run under WINE.

You only need to get it wrong once to screw your whole setup. You set up client 1 to collect by POP but leave the messages on the server. You set up client 2 the same, and you've got the messages on both. You set up client 3, but forget to set the "leave messages on server" box before you start, and they are gone from the server.

But more importantly, using POP3 like this only works if you have a small number of messages, no structure (such as folders), no interest in tracking outgoing emails, and are happy to "read" the same email on every client. It was perhaps not too bad a decade ago, but when you have had an email account under heavy use for some years, you want something better. And when you have multiple clients (such as a telephone, a pad, a couple of desktops, a laptop - plus webmail clients) with the same email account, you want them synchronised and the incoming, archived and sent emails all available.

You can backup your local copies of IMAP mails without trouble. A decent desktop email client will happily let you download folders for "offline use" - then you save the folders in whatever backup system you want. For more sophisticated backup, use imapsync to make copies (including updating old backups, rather than downloading everything again) - and you can serve out these downloaded copies using an IMAP server so that your backup copies are conveniently accessible.

Of course, the best idea is to make sure the server has good backups and replication, such as by using a solid server company or doing your own imap serving.

"We at Rackspace Strongly recommend using an IMAP connection with Rackspace Email"

That's way too much like work. I just turn off deletion on the server, and use POP3 everyplace. Knowing when I last read my mail takes care of the multiple new messages problem, so it isn't an issue.

Cheers

Phil Hobbs

Registering a gmail account, then connecting by imap is not a great deal of work. It is far less work than messing around with pop3 backups - it is even less work than remembering to disable server deletion on pop3. And if you prefer Rackspace to gmail, using imap is not exactly rocket science there either. The hosting company will handle the backups.

We agree that setting up email isn't very difficult, but we obviously have very different philosophies of backing up stuff. As far as I'm concerned, if it isn't backed up on discs that I can touch myself, it isn't backed up. Server-side backup is a nice-to-have, for sure, but Google can turn the lights out on Gmail any time it wants. I have backups of my mail from two or three mail servers that no longer exist (including some from VM mainframe days).

Cheers

Phil Hobbs

Back-up... I have everything on my local hard-drive _plus_ additionally written to CD's or DVD's.

I certainly wouldn't have folders on gmail. What I have is all mailbox/folder sorting done at my local PC.

I'm rather extreme >:-} but I have several hundred E-mail addresses via my website, which forward to two on gmail, from whence I retrieve them with Eudora, which sorts them into the appropriate location.

Outbound I simply use Cox... they (so far) don't screw with outbound E-mail (as long as you're not running a list server). ...Jim Thompson

Terabyte USB hard drives are under $100 nowadays. I back up my mail daily, rotating backups, and monthly propagate that to my offsite PCs.

DVDs are so last century.