Lois & Clark Forums Forums General Discussion Off Topic Q: What kind of web mail account would you recommend?

As some of you already know, I am going to be separated from my computer for a month or so, come February. (Could be even longer <sigh>.) I will therefore be reliant on the kindness of others (or cyber cafes) for internet access.

Because of that, I want to set up an email account that I can access via the web. I know about yahoo and hotmail and some of the alternatives... but what I really want are recommendations.

Which are good? Which are bad? Perhaps most important of all, which have the best spam filters?

Any and all answers will be gratefully received.

Thanks,

Chris

Chris, you do know that you can access your Freeserve account via the web? Not sure about spam filters, though...


Wendy

i've tried a few services. hotmail probably has the best spam filters, but even they can't keep up with all the spam that automatically comes with a hotmail account. it's kind of funny, really. hotmail makes money by selling your address to anyone and everyone, but tries to keep you happy by building in some of the best spam filters around. go figure.

i've done better with my netscape mail account (which came with my AIM account, but you can sign up seperately, too). it doesn't have any spam filters that i know of, but it doesn't really need them. netscape doesn't sell your address, so as long as you don't give it to anyone who does (like posting it on a website or signing it up with a site that sells its lists), you won't get spam. netscape has also been the best about delivery time.

another service i've tried is go.com. they don't sell address lists, either, and it does come with spam filters. otoh, it can be slow to deliver your mail. they've gotten better about it lately, but messages can still be delayed by up to a day. also, go.com is owned by disney. it's part of their whole family of sites. so when you sign in, you get a tracking cookie installed on your comp.

alt-clark used one of myownemail.com 's many servers (they have a list of available domain names, including starplace.com). good delivery, no account expiration date (even if you don't sign in for over a month), but no spam filters, and you have to get a bit of spam to keep the account. not much, though. less than one a week.

one service that i haven't tried (and i'm not certain they still offer it) is the vatican. they offer free webmail at catholic.org. i can't imagine you'd get much in the way of spam there (how many porn sites would try sending email to cathlic.org?), but you might start getting vatican newsletters or something. <shrug>

hope this helps.

Paul

I have both an hotmail and yahoo account. On both I hardly receive spam. Granted, I hardly use yahoo and never use the adress, so I don't receive any email there.

I've always liked hotmail. It's easy to use, especially after the last changes. And for as far as I can remember, the only spam I got was last year with one of those virusses, and it went straight to the bulk mail. That's what I really like about hotmail, unknown adresses immidiately end up in bulk.

For me, one of the important things of hotmail is also the easy usage of MSN. Chatting with my friends, and playing games with your friends. <g>

Saskia

I use Yahoo and have been happy with it, though I don't have any basis for comparison since it's the only one I've ever tried. It does have a built-in spam filter, but one thing I've found is that I get significantly less spam there than I do on my lcfanfic account, presumably because I list the lcfanfic one in "public" and I only use the Yahoo one for personal correspondence and sites which have privacy policies in place (online banking, investement companies, etc.)

So my guess is that if you get a new Yahoo (or other service) email address and only give it out to the people you need to stay in touch with while you are gone, you won't have to deal with all that much in the way of spam while you are traveling.

Kathy

I have used Altavista (do they even still exist?), Hotmail, and Yahoo.

My preference is STRONGLY for Yahoo. While their spam filter is not perfect, it's fairly good, and continues to improve. (I get such a thrill out of deleting lots of spam with the push of one button! )

I have never had a delivery problem with Yahoo that was their fault (to my knowledge). I have frequently had problems receiving email in a timely manner via Hotmail -- main reason I stopped using it. Sending email to friends with Hotmail accounts is hit-or-miss on how long it takes to deliver too.

And unlike Sas, I prefer AIM to MSN Messenger, so that's no bonus either.

Hi,

I like better hotmail. Never had a problem.

MAF

The biggest problem with my hotmail account - and I do admit that I have the free one - is that I'm limited as to what I can send regarding file size. Anything over 1 mg is pretty much not going to make it through.

Lynn

I never tried any except for Yahoo and Hotmail, and I used Yahoo only for a short time. Still, I like Hotmail very much. It's accessible from anywhere, that's a plus. Their spam filter is excellent- mine is set up to the highest level, so that any messages from people not on my contact list go to my junk mail folder. Of course, I have to go through my junk mail to make sure I don't delete anything I need, but then I prefer that over getting my inbox clogged. It allows you to block certain addresses if they annoy you too much, and if there's a contact you don't write to but get messages from (like website administrators and such), you can put it in a 'safe list', so that goes into your inbox.

I prefer the MSN messanger over AIM, though I have and use both. I like it mainly because it allows you to customize emoticons, but also because I have been using it longer and am more familiar with it, so others who are used to AIM may feel more confortable with it.

Julie

I use yahoo and I love it. I have two accounts set up through yahoo, one is public and one is private. The public one I use whenever I have to sign up for anything, so I get a TON of spam, but it all gets filtered out and I never have to look at it. I've never had a single piece of spam make it to my inbox. My private email is known only by a handful of people and is nowhere online. I get about 2-4 pieces of spam per day there, but again, it all gets filtered out and I never have to look at it. I really like yahoo's format (especially the filters option - I set each of my listservs up with a filter so that they each have a folder of my own. Then when I log in, rather than just seeing that I have 10 new emails, I see that I have 2 emails in my inbox, 4 in my LCfic folder, and 4 in my young journalists listerv folder. It really helps when I'm in a big hurry and don't want to sort through 35 emails from a suddenly-active listserv to find the email from my boss.)

Annie

Thank you all for your helpful comments.

Okay, so how many other people have 'Duh!' moments?

The answer to this is that yes, I did know. The problem I was having, however, was that although I could read the messages I could not delete them. I was picturing the accumulation of spam and the amount of time it would take to retrieve it all at the end of x number of weeks, and it was giving me the heebie jeebies just thinking about it!

However, Wendy, you inspired me to think laterally, and I managed to solve that particular problem very easily, simply by unchecking a box that I had previously left checked in an options menu.

I've nonetheless set up a yahoo account. The reason is quite simply that, one of these days, I will probably change my ISP... or, if I end up travelling around for multiple months rather than one, it would seem sensible to close the freeserve account. In that case, a free account would be rather handy and might ease a period of transition.

Now all I need to do is tell people what it is...

Anyway, once again, thank you all.

Chris

i don't have a yahoo email account, but i have dealt with yahoo groups for the ficlist and such.

i just thought i'd mention that yahoo can be very sneaky about privacy. by default, they use "web beacon" cookies to track your internet usage (so they can sell the demographic info) and, also by default, they sell your address to a variety of companies (i suddenly got quite a bit of spam on my listmail addy. didn't understand until i got a message 2 weeks *later* that yahoo had changed the way they handled marketing preferences, and if i didn't want those emails, i should change my account settings). i suggest that you carefully review your privacy and marketing preferences as soon as you can.

web beacons, btw, are by browser, not account, so you'll have to disable them for each browser you use from each comp that you use.

anyone have the page that lets you do that handy? not sure where i put the addy for it.

Paul

I use Yahoo. Don't have too much problems with cookies. Then again, I use Ad-Aware and Spybot S&D, which probably explains why.

I don't have much good to say about Hotmail. To me, Spam=Hotmail. It is a very long story, so bear with me a little.

It was the first free email server I ever used, way back in 1996. I suppose when I first went online I was young and naive and not very wise about keeping my email address private. So spam attacked my first username (hmchew).

I got wiser with a second username (meclone2), and in addition set the filter to second highest (just short of restricting only to those in an Address Book). The filter worked, for a time. Then spam struck again. I had to actively block email servers, which proved to be only a stopgap measure, because eventually Hotmail didn't let me block any more servers, and spam piled up.

So I got a third Hotmail account. This time, I used my real name (or rather, a Mandarin hanyu pinyin transliteration of it) zhouhuimei, and turned on similar filter settings. At the same time, I signed up with Yahoo for the first name using meclone2 (by that time I got rather fond of "meclone2", so I adopted it as my Internet name).

In the 3 months after signing up for both accounts, I exclusively used my meclone2@yahoo account and virtually ignored my zhouhuimei@hotmail account, so I hadn't given my third Hotmail address to any one. After those months, I finally logged into my newest Hotmail account. Guess what I found in there? Spam. Not just any spam. I found Chinese spam. Somehow, the spammer programs recognized my Mandarin hanyu pinyin username and realised that I very likely knew Chinese. Lo and behold, spam that catered to that.

If spam wasn't so disgustingly annoying, I would almost respect the spam program writers. To those who don't have a problem with Hotmail, I can only say "good for you". I was never so lucky.

In contrast, I have been using Yahoo since that time. I have not received a single spam. Ever.

--meclone2--