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About, but not the only. I have a free punkass.com POP3 email account, but there are several other providers that still provide free POP3 & Web Based email,as well. Plus you can always use some program like yahoopops, fetchyahoo or yahoo2mbox to download most any web based email to a POP3 email client.

Reversing everything written with LTR directionality to RTL is not difficult in web pages (there are dir=rtl attributes and CSS2 also supports "direction:rtl") and webmasters can easily apply these to whole documents or elements within them.

Email is another issue:
I know in Hebrew directionality is often wrong in email I receive, and the charset is often not specified correctly, resulting in garbled display. I see lots of postings from Hebrew email users about these problems, but I don't see much Arab postings. Is the situation similar in Arabic? What might be reasons that I don't see as much Arabic speakers complaining about encoding or directionality issues (in international forums)? Are arab speakers aware of these problems or just accept them as "reality" (as most Hebrew users of email including corporate users do)?

There is no way to specify rtl directionality in plain text, and certainly not "per paragraph" (except for embeding special Unicode characters that alter the bidi algorithm behaviour). That makes plain text email quite unusable in RTL languages, except for short notes.
HTML mail is almost a "must" in composing RTL email, but even then many people don't do it right, and lots of people use webmail clients that don't allow specifying rtl directionality (Gmail, Yahoo. FastMail.FM is an exeption in actually willing to spend money on full bidi support http://www.emailaddresses.com/forum/showthread.php ?postid=362403#post362403 ) Others mistake right alignment for RTL directionality. Another problem is with webmail providers such as Yahoo that claim they send us-ascii only but actually accepting any character input and marking it as iso-8859-1 (latin-1) and not what it actually is).
I see lots of email in Hebrew that is sent with wrong MIME headers (with respect to charset encoding) that makes standards compliant email viewers show the email garbled. Mainly because there is a slight difference in the interpretation of "Content-type" headers in MIME and in HTTP (in HTTP no charset specified means just that. In MIME it means MUST use us-ascii to render. Many newletters are sent with no charset in MIME header and tag in the html and are then correctly displayed as garbled text rendered in us-ascii).

But as for using webmail, just don't. :) Okay, when you have no alternative when behind a firewall or in a netcafe, maybe. But even then it sucks. You're typing something in, you click send. Server reports that your session timed out and requests you log back in. Hit the back button only to find the form containing your message is cleared. :(

Free email providers with pop3 and imap exist. Use any standard email client such as thunderbird or evolution.

find one here

Disclaimer: I work for FastMail.FM

Many of the customers we pick up previously used either free email services or an email component of an overall hosting company. The problem being that since email wasn't the primary business of their provider, it wasn't treated with the priority that email users need.

A good place to compare services and read reviews is EmailAddresses.com. There are forums specifically for a few of the bigger dedicated providers there, as well as more general discussion areas, and the owners of many of the services read the forums. While they are mainly aimed at the free services, there are paid services listed as well.

yes they have a WAP interface!

Eee... argh. Yes, we do. What a horrible standard (and insert ObPHPSucks rant here - at least for doing UTF8 conversions and such. All our standard libraries are written in Perl, and I'm likely to rewrite WAP in it some day).

I actually did a bunch of work on the (not so well advertised) beta WAP site - read the forums for more information at EmailAddresses.com. I'm not going to link directly to our WAP server from Slashdot!

Bron.

I know it runs contrary to everything the Open Source movement stands for, but it might be worth paying real money for a real service.

Very, very valid point. However, you could also just find someone else who is still willing to give it away...

From the article:

This is a democratic effect, improved by manual de-selection of legitimate domains by SpamCop users when they submit their reports. More reports means more votes that a given site is indeed spam.

Though the article's author feels that "most SC users probably make an effort to uncheck legitimate domains to prevent false reporting," I have read reports that some mail server admins claim that SpamCop's users are rather likely to mistakenly report ham as spam. So the domain whitelist becomes important, but what practices have the SURBL administrators put in place to prevent corruption with respect to sites reported to whitelist at surbl dot org?

email forums has plenty of information about other email providers as well.

email forums has plenty of information about other email providers as well.

fastmail will let you use their smtp server for a one time fee of $14.95. which also gets you access to an imap account, web based mail, super good spam filtering, and some other stuff.

i primarily use them for the smtp server nowdays though.

and if you sign up and are feeling generous, you can use "jwilson" as the referrer code and i'll get a kickback of a $1 or something. woo! :)

you may want to go read their official support forums, with regular appearances from the actual developers/owners of the company, to get a feel for what they offer/how they operate, etc.

regardless of the smtp server, their web based mail is super nice. go tell your hotmail using friends to sign up to the free fastmail account (sans-smtp access) instead... fastmail will happily suck mail from existing hotmail accounts, so it makes the transition a bit easier.

FastMail is a great email service that's gaining quite a large following. There's multiple membership levels including a free service. Definitely worth checking out.

If this isn't your cup of tea I strongly suggest you check out EmailAddresses.com for a fairly comprehensive list of email services.

Not really. Using this guide, you can set up e-mail with your own domain name being fowarded to the e-mail service of your choice. If that service goes away, simply change your fowarding to a different account.

As far as e-mail services go, I'd recommend FastMail. The free service is better than Yahoo, Hotmail or any other service I've seen and the paid accounts start as low as a $14.95 one-time fee and move up from there. I guess you can say I'm a satisfied customer.

A list of free web-based email providers. Create multiple Slashdot accounts!

A list of free anonymous proxy servers. Post anonymously without the hassle of IP-banning!

LNUX vs. MSFT. Count the days to Slashdot's demise!

Yahoo used to be a pretty cool mail service, a place to have a permanent email address regardless of where you were at, but that has changed, now they have removed some of the best features pop and forwarding, and you have to put up with ads and spam.

And then they want you to pay through the nose for the pop and forwarding. For 25MB extra storage space I was already paying $30 per year, which should be more than enough to cover their costs for my account.

Fortunately Yahoo is not the only one in this space. Of course, there is hotmail, but unfortunately it's even worse, i.e. spam and only 2mb storage space, so it's better to try something else.

Emailaddresses.com has a list of free web based emails and for a fee emails. I'll probably be switching to Runbox.com which offers 100MB for 3 years for $59, with no ads and a lot more features than yahoo offers for the same price.

hushmail.com might be a good one if you always run IE as your web browser.

I'd be interested to know of any other decent web and pop email service alternatives.

France and Germany have some free access providers, courtesy of emailaddresses.com:

Germany: Comundo and Germany.net

France: Free.fr, Freesurf, Liberty Surf, WorldOnline

France and Germany have some free access providers, courtesy of emailaddresses.com:

Germany: Comundo and Germany.net

France: Free.fr, Freesurf, Liberty Surf, WorldOnline

On his web-site Mr Gilmore suggests contacting his provider (Verio) to let them know what you think. Sounds like a splendid idea to me. Here's the message that I sent (I don't believe in republishing other people's addresses, so I've anonymised them. The correct addresses are available from the toad.com URL linked below):
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From: "Jeremy Howard" INVALID@fastmail.fm.INVALID
To: "Darren Grabowski" INVALID@verio.net.INVALID
Cc: "John Gilmore" INVALID@toad.com.INVALID,
"NOC Security" INVALID@noc.verio.net.INVALID,
" Vantive Updates" INVALID@vanwebserv.verio.net.INVALID
Subject: Comments on open relay at toad.com

Dear Darren,

John Gilmore suggests that people should contact you regarding the treatment of his open relay at toad.com:
http://www.toad.com/gnu/verio-censorship.html

I am a director of FastMail.FM, a popular email provider. I would like to applaud you for trying to help rid the Internet of open relays. We have
recently completed an analysis that suggested that for each 10,000 messages that arrives at our system from open relays, only one (on average) is valid email, while the remainder are unsolicated commercial email (UCE, or 'spam').

There is no valid reason to run an open relay SMTP server. There are many effective authentication mechanisms. For instance, at FastMail.FM we use SMTP AUTH, which our users have found to be a convenient and robust method for authenticating with our SMTP server. We also provide a web interface for sending email, which allows users without access to a client supporting SMTP AUTH (although most do) to compose messages, format text, spell check, maintain an address book, and so forth.

We block all messages from open relays, and we scan frequently used sending IP addresses for open relays automatically and send positive results to some DNSBLs such as ORDB.org. We would encourage you to do the same.

We have a very active user community that receives over a thousand posts a month by enthusiastic users. Every time open relay blocking has been discussed here by our users it has been overwhelmingly supported, as has the support of DNSBLs that list open relays.

We encourage you to maintain your stance on closing open relays. Furthermore, I hope that Verio will consider taking a more pro-active stance against "spammers" in the future--there are still numerous known spammers operating through Verio's network despite repeated emails to your abuse desk informing of the problem.

Thanks for you time,
Jeremy Howard
Director
FastMail.FM

If more ISPs offered IMAP and people knew the advantages they wouldn't touch POP with a 100ft pole

You don't need your ISP to support IMAP. You can sign up with an IMAP provider, such as one listed here.

• Mailing address - Your local post office (US link, consult your directory if not in US)
• Phone Number - UReach, OneBox, eFax
• E-Mail address - Yahoo!, HotMail, Several Others

Not very hard at all, especially since you'll give false information to the latter two groups in order to sign up, and the first one can't sell your info anyway.

---

Good places for non-real e-mail addresses include

http://www.emailaddresses.com/
And http://www.another.com/

Michael

Best free email I've used is SoftHome. Very reliable and fast. I found it at www.emailaddresses.com. Check it out.