Selfish, Personal Post: If You Were to Start Tomorrow, What e-mail service would you use?

After a day of waiting on hold with my new internet server (I “bundled” for considerable savings but also because our local cable provider had been swallowed in a buy-out),  the last techie informed me that it was surprising I still got any e-mails – not that they were disappearing from my inbox and from deleted, etc.  (And pretty soon I wouldn’t get any.)   Suddenlink addresses, apparently, were being sent to some black hole.  Meanwhile, Optimum does not provide that service.

I guess I need to move on.  Opinions are generally well supported (and not in short supply) among Chicagoboyz; what has your experience taught you?  I’d love anecdotes  but statements like – XX is wonderful or terrible will also help.   After all, who is more savvy than a Chicagoboy?  On the other hand, I’m incompetent and totally rely on the Greek Squad so simplicity and safety are my biggest concerns.

14 thoughts on “Selfish, Personal Post: If You Were to Start Tomorrow, What e-mail service would you use?”

  1. Very happy with Fastmail

    It is no longer practical to host your own email server, big email will squash anything coming from it.

  2. Long time lurker.
    Not a joiner/participant.
    But i do like your site!

    A gentle reminder if I may-
    if it’s digital, online,
    it is not secure/private.
    With time/intent/$,
    it can be got.

    pro tonn checks a lot of the appropriate boxes
    (which to me is a red flag. how convenient of them.
    also, especially as Swissy threw away neutrality the last time as recently as 2022, when siding with the crane boys and against their neighbors, being swissy and located there doesn’t have it’s former swagger).

    Also, another “coincidence”(?)- in the past, these (lu) cern bois had a crisis. their salvation came in the form of guggle. who ran a line, hardware and software into pro’s
    gear. detailz used to be readily available online.

    All that, i still use em without the knowledge they are still, part of big brother’s system.
    fwiw

    keep up the good work!

    may The Lord bless prosper protect you and your clan.

  3. Though I still have to keep a Gmail account around I’ve moved a lot of correspondence to a paid Protonmail account with my own domain. This is fairly good, though often eager to mark emails as spam.
    I’d be tempted to try Fastmail if starting again as I hear it has a good reputation for reliability.

  4. I’d go with Proton, at which I have an account. Proton’s Black Friday sale may still be on. I don’t recall exactly but $120/year buys 10 email address and more than 500MB of storage.

    As it is, I’ve had my own domain names since 2003 and have used several different hosts.

  5. I have used Yahoo for a long time, the joke that goes with that is that I never have to question whether I’ve been hacked. That said, I’ve never had any issues and very little spam. I still use their web interface.

    The problem with any email provider is that all that information is just sitting there on their servers forever and you need to behave accordingly. Over time, the probability that someone will make a mistake approaches certainty. Never put anything in an email that you wouldn’t want to see in the New York Times. In practice, that means no bank, credit card or social security numbers or information. It’s not likely that hackers would be interested, or able to exploit, your back and forth with you doctor about your bunions but it’s something to keep in mind. If you are engaging in some sort of conspiracy, encrypting and decrypting your messages on a computer, never connected to the internet raises the level of effort needed to eavesdrop but probably doesn’t completely eliminate it.

    Security comes down to how much trouble someone is willing to take to get around it. If your adversary has super computers and cypher experts on call and directed against you, you’re probably not going to be able to do much about it. For the rest of us, the common safeguards and encryption that has become standard is probably enough.

    Just about anything you choose will be better than whatever your internet provider has, just because it’s not tied to that provider and we’re starting to see that we’re all going to have lots of choices soon. I’d look for someone that’s been around for a while and Yahoo checks that box nicely.

    When I first started with Yahoo, I was bothered that I couldn’t use a mail client (separate computer program to manage email, running on my computer) without a paid account, since then I found I like using the web interface. Other people will need or want the ability to use a client, so that may be a consideration, but I think it’s pretty standard, even for free accounts now.

  6. I’m not a fan of free email since you have no expectation of privacy or service. I’ve had Protonmail for about 5 years. It costs something like $50 per year. The features are a little different from Gmail, but logical enough. Gmail will only add features to integrate with other Google services, while Protonmail adds features to improve the service.

    The main feature is that Protonmail can’t read your email.

  7. I used to have my own mail servers and used them for a long time, first Sendmail and then Qmail, but when I quit the server game, I just moved to Gmail.

    Excellent mail servers. The best system management in the game and 15G free storage in their cloud, its really hard to beat.

    Now I know the sysadmin can see anything on his servers, because I sure could. The root admins are god basically and can do whatever they want. So actual security is impossible on any server. However no one cares about your silly life and the chance of anyone seeing any of your special stuff is low. But that is as good as it gets. So I just use the best mail server out there, Gmail. ;)

  8. I’m still using the same @aol.com account I set up back in 1992. Thirty years… But I don’t get that much email nor use it for business.

  9. Be careful about using The Greek Squad as experts. They went bankrupt a few years ago. Of course, I’m kidding. It’s the Greeks, not the Geeks, that went bankrupt. I use something called “icloud.com” which seems OK. I get tons of useless email because my wife loves online shopping and does not understand computers so I get all the ads and sale notices from her shopping sites. I can’t block them because some are confirmation notices and she needs the order numbers because she returns about half of what she buys.

    She has many good features, too.

  10. I like my own domain hosted with Network Solutions as a commercial account with multiple mail boxes and an extra cost catch all for personal private use. It’s not cheap and it’s not as convenient as I’d like but I do believe price aside it’s as good as it gets – reliably serviced with good commercial user support. Sort of like cell phone providers I’ve never heard anybody say they really loved their current provider and many with high hopes for a new to them provider. Sadly it seems circular with a disappointed user leaving in disgust as a new user moves in with high hopes. If I wanted privacy I think PGP is still viable with useful interfaces.

    I was happy with Outlook 10 managing all my accounts into one master Window with a number of macros including multiple names @name on Network Solutions and name@msn to go with name@gmail.com.

    Office 365 has led me to using each provider’s web interface with multiple log ins and multiple tabs on multiple browsers. If I wanted privacy I think PGP is still viable with useful interfaces

  11. Gmail.com is the easy standard. Free, easy to use, nobody mis-spells the words after the dot.

    If you want what you send to be kept secret, drive over and tell them in person. That’s the only real safe way.

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