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• Calendar - this is great, it has enriched my memory challenged life
  
  
• IMAP email - Very handy, I use https://www.fastmail.fm/ for webmail / imap. The only downside is that the phone can't use SSL for the connection. IMAP's header only approach keeps the data use down. I often email myself while I'm out & about if there's some useful snippet of info I will forget. It will be there in my inbox when I get home.
  
  
• Camera - quicker than using the keypad to note down any URIs, Emails, phone numbers, things in shops etc. etc. all sorts of stuff.
  
  
• Bluetooth - exchanging data with other phone users, though it is not surprising that when I say "Bluetooth me your number" plenty of people reply "I don't know how, you're the first person to ask me".
  
  

> I have a catch-all email address set up on my domain - so $anything@$mydomain gets to me.
> [...] a few months ago, some [...] decided to use my domain name in forged From: addresses.
> I now receive on the order of a thousand spams, bounces and assorted related crap per day.
> [...] (Yes, I could switch off the catch-all addressing, but I actually find it useful,
> inconsiderate wankers trying to ruin the entire net for everyone not withstanding)

I use a Fastmail account.
The Sieve filtering is pretty good so I don't usually get more than a couple of spam messages/day while still being conservative about false positives.

However, the "secondary" spam -- mostly automated replies to forged addresses -- are getting quite annoying.

1. Certificates give Verisign more $
   
2. Most websites are read only. So the only interesting bit for a spy is who connects, SSL doesn't hide that.
   
3. You can't use SSL on multiple virtual hosts in Apache 1.x (not sure about 2.x) so even for self signing you have to choose which single hostname to use.
   
4. What incentive for me as a host ?
   

Alternatively, check out nginx. Sure you have to wade through the Russian, but the configuration syntax is pretty simple and it's easy enough to build.

It uses epoll. We replaced a perdition proxy that was seriously loading two servers with a single 8 process nginx instance that's not even breaking a sweat. It's amazing what the change from 32000 process down to 8 processes can do on a busy site! The two frontend machines are now configured with heartbeat to get full failover of IP addresses. Downtime appears to be on the order of 1-2 seconds with an orderly cutover and probably about 10 seconds for a total host failure.

Cyrus supports replication now, which is a good way to handle the backends. I'd say more about it, but I haven't actually finished configuring the full failover system yet for this - lots of gating logic required to make sure two machines don't both believe they're master for a bit!

Er, but why would I help you anyway, you're the competition ;)

(I work for FastMail.FM btw)

I'm a Yahoo Mail/Web Hosting user, and I've been seriously thinking of jumping to http://fastmail.fm// just because of the moral problems of the people who run these large corporations, throwing morals out with the Articles of Incorporation. At least Fastmail.fm is still small enough to not want to make these kinds of deals, swapping freedom for economic gains.

I can use FastMail anywhere I can fire up a web browser, too. But it also allows me to use an IMAP client (or a POP client, but only for paid subscribers) as well. There may be some advantages to GMail, but after trying it out a few months ago, I decided to stick with FastMail and use Thunderbird to read it. If you'd like to check it out, go here (disclosure: this is a referral link; if someone opens a paid account, or a guest account that is later upgraded, I get a small credit toward my own account -- if you don't like me enough to do that [sniffle], you can just browse to www.fastmail.fm, too).

-Mike

I see everyone switching to gmail from their good working ISP mail or other providers.

I can't see a point here. All I see (as advantage) is POP3 but you give Google right to harvest your personal mails for that. Is it OK for you? OK, next time don't jump up and down when poor shareware tries to check for updates over net as "Spy!!!"

For example, when I gave up Spamcop mail, I checked around and there are marvellous and amazing sites just dedicated to mail. One could be http://fastmail.fm/

As a "geek" you must check that and you will be surprised I bet. I mean, at least they offer TLS IMAP and TLS SMTP. It is 2006, come on!

So why people advertising google for free? I mean, like some sort of "googleogy" has been founded and I was offline during that... Let me in, I want to join too! :)

I use Yahoo mail since '98. If they offer secure IMAP and SMTP for the price, I will even buy "premium" one.

We can't make ISPs use IMAP, amazing but true. If it comes to "using another 3rd provider", that is the time I DEMAND it.

I don't think I've ever seen an article summary with so many links!

Their largest account comes with 2GB's of space, IMAP/POP, Spam Assasin, Sieve, 250MB of file space and tonnes more other things. All for only 40bucks a year. They have other plans, so you can pick and choose what you need.

Fastmail, http://www.fastmail.fm/, has always been a popular IMAP service and includes POP and webmail access as well. You can get 2 GB of storage for around $40.00/year which is $3.33/month. Not to bad. I'm personally not a subscriber but I consider it every now and then.

http://marc.theaimsgroup.com/?t=112068507200001&r= 1&w=2

Hopefully the patch for making this a mount option will make its way into 2.6.16 along with another couple of patches that we (FastMail.FM) add for other reiser issues. It's still the best filesystem by far for large Cyrus installations though.

The best way I've found for reading RSS feeds is using an RSS-to-email gateway. This way any new articles are automatically delivered to my inbox, and filters put them in their own folders. Whatever computer I'm on, I check my mail (IMAP; using either webmail or a client) and I get all my mail and all my news. One stop for everything. Articles remain unread until I've dealt with them.

This works great. If I visit a site I find interesting, I subscribe to its feed. If it's ever updated, I get the update (or at least notification of the update) sent to me. And I can read it all from the comfort of my chosen mail client.

http://fastmail.fm/

I use it from my latop / desktop / web browser / Nokia 6600
etc. etc.

AIM mail gives you 2 GB of free space and IMAP access so you can use it from a real mail client. All you need is an AIM screen name.

For my personal mail I use Fastmail, IMAP mail with excellent server-side filtering. They had a brief outage last weekend, but aside from that they've been rock-solid for the last 2 years. They don't offer you enough storage space to make a warez repository out of your inbox, but it would take me a decade to fill up my 600 MB account.

They mean automatic "push" synchronization, where your phone's calendar and e-mail are updated wirelessly over the cellular network. That's where the Blackberry has the default Treo beat. (Though there is a really nice piece of non-free software called Chatter that can do push e-mail for the Treo 650 with IMAP servers like fastmail).

Fastmail.fm.

Use http://fastmail.fm/ . The free version has a small inbox, but everything is SSl'd, and there's IMAP support.

I'm by no means a developer though I read up on email technology and providers all the time.

I'd consider contacting the good folks at:
http://www.fastmail.fm/
they provide one of the fastest and most standards compliant IMAP, pop3, and SMTP services I've ever used

They support lots of bandwidth and storage and low costs using, AFAIK, all open-source software at a seemingly low cost per user

Also, the individual who maintains the following website might be of good assistance to you:
http://www.ii.com/internet/messaging/imap/isps/
and
http://www.ii.com/

If you really want to do something like this in house, hire someone like Nigel Metheringham (old friend of mine, haven't had any contact with him in years) who set up the mail system for freeserve.co.uk when they first got started. Look at what others have done.

Crucially, you will want several inbound MXes, several outbound SMTPs, and your IMAP server on the most robust hunk of metal and silicon that you can get your hands on.

Years ago I would have recommended UW-IMAP with mbx format, not mbox format. Now-a-days, I'd be more inclined to use Cyrus IMAP. As for sendmail, postfix or exim, I've got my personal favorites. Your choice will have to be based on more than my prejudices and biases. But do take a look at exim, many things were built into it for freeserve.co.uk. (Freeserve went from zero to more than a million users in a few short months when it started.)

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.

I find I prefer the interface of Fastmail. It doesn't use Ajax and it isn't as pretty, but I find it has stayed as my main e-mail client.

I like some of the things about GMail, like the labels, but I don't like the long delay when you first visit it while it downloads all the scripting, and I don't find swapping between sets of e-mail within labels particularly quick either.

This is why I've stuck with Fastmail - by keeping the interface simple I find it faster, and on the design front I find their interface slightly more usable.

Copy all AOL mail into a standards compliant mail app, using AOL's IMAP server.

Sign up for a free IMAP webmail account at Fastmail

Copy all AOL mail into Fastmail inbox. Wait 15 mins for the web server to sync

Log into fastmail webpage, and select all messages, choose "redirect to" from actions list, and enter gmail address. All messages will be re-sent to gmail with the original senders address. the "received time" will be todays date but the mesage wil keep original sent date within.

> ... in some geographic areas ... the only broadband provider ...
> does not provide conforming internet mail service to residential customers.

I wouldn't like to live in that area...
It's a monoply. Monopolies should be regulated. A minimum requirement from a monopolistic Internet service provider should be to provide standard compliant access. There are ways to find the spammers in your network without denying service from customers (like reading spam complaints sent to your abuse team. Like not refusing "munged" SpamCop reports that usually point exactly to the IP address sending spam).

> How much does SMTP AUTH + TLS smarthosting cost per month
That would probably depend on how much mail you need to send. One time payment of $15 gives you lifetime SMTP AUTH (and lots of other things you don't have to use) but is limited monthly bandwidth of 30MB. For $20/yr (~$1.67/month) or $40/yr (~$3.33/month) you get 300MB/month, 1GB/month respectively and additional BW can be purchased (see http://www.fastmail.fm/pages/fastmail/docs/pricing tbl.html). Maybe a hosting service can give better MB/$ ratio for higher bandwidth requirements.

Maybe the folks at emaildiscussions.com would know more than me about possibilities to host outgoing mail. And actually it's a good place to ask the question aked here. There are several people there administering email on different levels - from managing email for a few friends/family to running full scale email services.

I can only go by my own experience, but I used a fastmail IMAPO account to upload 3 years of email from the inbox on my PC to the IMAP web server, then from the server used redirect to send it all to gmail

Of about 2,500 messages moved this way into my gmail account (as a backup and to make them searchable), only 1 was spam-canned. I make that an accuracy rate of 99.6%. The 30 or so spam mails I got during the month in which I did this were all correctly moved to the spam-can

That sort of accuracy rate is fine by me..

I simply use "@reg.surname.com" for example "yahoo@reg.smith.com". Using the reg. subdomain keeps the domains e-mail address space available for more important things.

I quite fancy using "<first name>@<site name>.surname.com" like "john@yahoo.smith.com" that way I can have all my family using the same method but, unfortunately, my e-mail provider can't support it (yet).

The subdomain will specify the label or folder.

I have been with approximately 15 different ISPs in the past 10 years. Needless to say, all but 2 had horrid SMTP servers (same goes for their POP3's).
Which is why so many choose to use webmail providers such as http://fastmail.fm/ and http://shinyfeet.com/ for their day to day stuff, and only use the ISP given email for very little correspondance.

so I keep thunderbird open for the ISP addy and firefox open for the webmail.

I do like that the FTC is getting other governments involved.

or maybe CAN's official's palms are not as well greased like there are here [US].

RIAA (and MPAA) need to get some criminal proof so they can use subpenoa's, otherwise, just pointing and saying 'gimmie' is not going to make the courts jump on their side.
P2P does not appear to be dying, as long as you lump bittorrent under that umbrella.

I'm suprised more people are not using services like http://fastmail.fm/ and http://www.shinyfeet.com/file sharing (well fastmail does not have sharing, but you can put small files into a public folder - shinyfeet is unlimited space/storage but no public, must be shinyfeetshinyfeet)
but I guess those services are too much like the old napster.

we are getting a bit OT here, but within the context of the gmail vs exchange and your comment regarding reading other's email because exchange allows it, is bogus.
it does happen, but it is *clearly* logged (that another user has another's mailbox open). and the majority of the time, it is only when security plays a factor, either by request or authorization that you must scan (and there better be damn good cause). however, this is a very grey area that has been argued many times over one's privacy at a company which employes you.
however, gmail is a minor threat to hotmail, perhaps not yahoo at all, but all will die to either fastmail or shinyfeet as they give what the user's want, not what the company wants as a new revenue stream. and even if there was a gmail appliance, they would have to provide admin ability to access emails of the accounts created.

But searching sucks, and I depend on Evolution to do virtual folders. I'd love it even more if my email server was actually a true RDBMS where I could have, besides the traditional IMAP interface, a D (Tutorial D or D4 or something the like) language interface where I could query at will, and save my queries as views that would show up in IMAP as (virtual) folders.

BTW, even non-relational ISO SQL would be so much better than what we have now.

I use ClamAV both at work and home. It's great.

My home setup is just a hosted VPS (previously a real box but I got tired of dealing with hardware issues) running email for myself and my family, plus a couple of mailing lists. I'm using amavis-new to apply both SpamAssassin and ClamAV to mails as a content_filter within Postfix.

Work has to be much higher performance - we use a custom LMTP proxy written in Perl which calls out to the clamd clamav daemon and contains a SpamAssassin instance which has been a lot more seriously tuned. We also run local copies of many RBLs (you generally need to pay to do that, but it's worth it for the saved network traffic if you've got enough spam comming in!)

Interestingly, I did some work on the lmtp proxy just last week so that even when the clamd is down (restarts, etc) it will fall back to calling out to 'clamscan' directly on the spool file and parsing the output.

So yes, especially since ClamAV 0.8, it's been very nice and easy to use - the mail scanning is reliable (haven't had a single virus get through into my mail, but I get around 30-50 virus notifications a day from it - I could probably turn them off, but it's nice to see what sort of traffic is floating around).

Bron.

Agreed. A webmail/POP only solution is worthless, even for free, but certainly not worth paying for. Good IMAP services are pretty damn cheap, so why bother!

Disclaimer: I work for FastMail.

If you want control over your email (and no evil search engine companies leveraging their giant database of email for nefarious purposes, natch) you're better off with something like FastMail. The free offering isn't quite so fancy, but the paid options rock.

In particular, our highest fee paying accounts now get to send and receive up to 50MB of attachments with an email, and that's a full 50MiB (including room for encoding in the Postfix limits)

Our interface is more designed around the IMAP protocol than Gmail, since that's what we use internally - and we offer (optionally) encrypted IMAP for everyone and encrypted POP & Auth SMTP for all paying users.

You also get a web site and file storage space which you can access directly from emails to attach or detach files, etc... but I'm not going to detail all the features here - just point out that the big names don't always offer the best features.

You open all your email with an email client and move all the disparate inboxes into a big IMAP store on your own computer or one provided by a joint like Fastmail.fm or Runbox.com

Then, you keep a local backup on any computer that you move to with offlineimap, a wonderful utility that doubles as a multi-inbox syncronizer and backup utility. I have been using it for the past two years and can attest to its reliability.

Is anybody using Sieve out there?

FastMail.FM uses Sieve. They're a great free (for basic service) IMAP/webmail provider.

I remember once my mail service provider went offline too a year or so back due to power failure but fortunately they had diesel generators for backup power. Dosen't Wikimedia has the same facility?

For Web hosting, here are some you might consider:

www.glypto.com (no phone support, but very responsive online support, EXTREMELY polite and helpful [they've been over-the-top polite to me and explained *nix things in-depth even when I asked things that would frustrate me if I were them], and excellent reliability)
www.hostrocket.com
www.registerfly.com (domain registration and Web hosting; their domain registration service is excellent; can't vouch for web hosting, but I wouldn't be surprised if it was good)

try fastmail.fm. I hear nothing but good about them.

If I was in the market for email-only hosting, I'd be looking at Fastmail. I have a free account with them right now and I've been impressed with their professionalism.

You seem like a typical Hotmail l00zer indeed ;)

1. Microsoft bought Hotmail from Sabeer Bhatia for $400 million in 1997, so in 95/96 it wasn't even 0wned by MS.

2. If you had been really smart you would have gotten your own domain. That way you really have an e-mail adress that will never go away.

3. Hotmail, Yahoo & Gmail are all fairly primitive services compared to my $35/yr enhanced http://fastmail.fm/ account. You get what you pay for...

X.

Gmail is every bit as "non-free" as Hotmail. Your average Gmail session is still obscured by layers upon layers of JavaScript, and use of third-party programs is in direct violation of the Program Policies: "users may not: ... Modify, adapt, translate, or reverse engineer any portion of the Gmail Service."

They offer free POP delivery just like Yahoo! Mail used to do, but who's to say whether that will continue when (if?) Gmail comes out of beta?

If you really want free access, sign up for a real non-beta e-mail service. I recommend Fastmail.

I hope this does not break Hotway.

It probably will. I use FastMail, and set it up to grab emails from my old Hotmail account, too. They recently (maybe 2 months ago) sent a message that Hotmail will be changing its send/receive format, and services like FastMail will no longer be able to retrieve that mail for you.

I will second that nomination. Fastmail.fm is great. You get POP3, IMAP, SMTP, an nice (skinnable too) web interface. Everything can run over SSL, including using their redirect proxies over arbitrary port numbers. They have some popmail checkers that will check my other accounts at defined intervals and deliver it to me.

Spam filters work great, and you can tune it if you prefer. Everyone in your addressbook can be automatically whitelisted.

I can use it at home, at work, on my mobile, on the road... It is great.

It is easy to use, and advanced options are a few clicks away if you can swim in deeper water.

Lots of great features - filter to folder, aliases, multiple names and domains...

The service is fantastic. Lots of documentation on how things work, and a community of users to help you solve a problem or suggest new features (and I believe one of my suggestions has been implemented).

If there is going to be a planned outage that cannot be resolved without downtime, they will post a warning about it, and then progress notes as they proceed. Everyone has downtime, but not everyone will tell you about it, and fewer still will give you a minute-by-minute synopsis.

A while ago, there was an outage for one day (actually, most of NE USA was dark that day). It was due to a power failure at one of ther hosting fascilities. They had a contract for guarenteed X% uptime, with a refund of $Y if that was not met. When the hosting company sent Fastmail.fm a refund for downtime, Fastmail.fm sent ME my portion of it (in the form of credits to my account). WOW. That's never happened to me before.

Bottom line - Fastmail is great. Try them out.

I will second that nomination. Fastmail.fm is great. You get POP3, IMAP, SMTP, an nice (skinnable too) web interface. Everything can run over SSL, including using their redirect proxies over arbitrary port numbers. They have some popmail checkers that will check my other accounts at defined intervals and deliver it to me.

Spam filters work great, and you can tune it if you prefer. Everyone in your addressbook can be automatically whitelisted.

I can use it at home, at work, on my mobile, on the road... It is great.

It is easy to use, and advanced options are a few clicks away if you can swim in deeper water.

Lots of great features - filter to folder, aliases, multiple names and domains...

The service is fantastic. Lots of documentation on how things work, and a community of users to help you solve a problem or suggest new features (and I believe one of my suggestions has been implemented).

If there is going to be a planned outage that cannot be resolved without downtime, they will post a warning about it, and then progress notes as they proceed. Everyone has downtime, but not everyone will tell you about it, and fewer still will give you a minute-by-minute synopsis.

A while ago, there was an outage for one day (actually, most of NE USA was dark that day). It was due to a power failure at one of ther hosting fascilities. They had a contract for guarenteed X% uptime, with a refund of $Y if that was not met. When the hosting company sent Fastmail.fm a refund for downtime, Fastmail.fm sent ME my portion of it (in the form of credits to my account). WOW. That's never happened to me before.

Bottom line - Fastmail is great. Try them out.

I have no affiliation other than being a happy customer.

IMAP gives the best of both worlds. I can use Thunderbird (or mutt for your terminal-types :-) to access my mail at my main computer, and a webmail interface whenever I'm elsewhere. I have access to all my messages anywhere without losing the power a good mail client provides.

Seriously, try a good IMAP provider. FastMail.fm offers IMAP support on their free accounts. I've been a full member for a couple years. Once I tried IMAP I never looked back.

Believe it or not, but a LOT of people like webmail, it keeps their mail centralized. This might be why they aren't offering IMAP ;)

(but then again, most users don't know how to use IMAP)

Nah, as I posted above, I'll keep my hotmail account as a spam catcher. I aggregate my accounts at fastmail.fm which is one of the best--I'm actually willing to pay for it. In any case between hotmail, fastmail and my own rules, it's very rare that I see spam in my inbox. I got rid of OE/outlook a while ago, and have gotten used to accessing/composing all my email thru the web.

Yeah, I agree. Disallowing Outlook is clearly a move to encourage people to upgrade. They have that right, but if I'm going to pay for e-mail, I'm going to pay for a quality service.

These days I've got an account on Fastmail.fm, which is a really well-run free (with optional paid upgrades) mail system, and I mostly use dodgeit.com for more disposable website registrations and such.

Or how about an IMAP provider which also offers webmail?