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Try FastMail instead. The Guest level account was enough for me (it's certainly far better than Hotmail!) but I upgraded to Member and now Full is starting to look pretty good.

600MB of storage for $20 a year. Also, 20MB of public/private file storage, and the sweet subdomain addressing feature (which has managed to keep me spam-free for two years!)

Try FastMail instead. The Guest level account was enough for me (it's certainly far better than Hotmail!) but I upgraded to Member and now Full is starting to look pretty good.

600MB of storage for $20 a year. Also, 20MB of public/private file storage, and the sweet subdomain addressing feature (which has managed to keep me spam-free for two years!)

fastmail.fm is an excellent web-based email service that has a setting that shows all HTML email as text. It doesn't actually change the email message so if you download it via IMAP or POP the HTML is still there. They also pull any links out down to the bottom of the email, like footnotes. It's automatic and it's a good way to avoid web bugs and the like.

I've been using both Fastmail.fm and Spamgourmet for over a year. Both services are free and very useful.

Fastmail provides a ad-free web-based and free access to IMAP. Spamgourmet provides a free full-featured email alias system. Using both of those free services, I get essentially no spam. I haven't gotten a single message of spam to my fastmail address ever in fact. I've found the information provided at Infinite Ink provides balanced reviews of free and pay-mail providers. Fastmail, in my opinion, is the most reliable free provider I've ever used along with the best web interface I've ever found.

http://www.sneakemail.com/ It's free, you can make as many addresses as you want, and when one starts getting spammed, just delete it. Use it for your own Web site; when it starts getting spam, delete the address, make a new one, and put the new one on your site.

http://www.fastmail.fm/Best e-mail provider, IMO. Their paid accounts can't be beat for price or features. Excellent uptime and service. I use them to host my own domain. Catchalls, custom server-side Sieve scripts, and several free aliases on their own domains too. Good SpamAssassin filtering too. You can try out a more limited free account too.

fastmail.fm (aka allmail.net and many others domain names) has SSL/IMAP access on all their accounts. The paid accounts are not expensive either and the web interface, if needed, is very clean and straight to the point. It is not Yahoo like you asked for but might a good alternative if you really want to supplement your existing IMAP provider with another IMAP account. I've been using it for about a year now polling with fetchmail and have no complaints.

POP3 is soooo 1990's

I agree 100%..

my webmail rightly lets me send with whatever From: field I choose

So I can emailwise be both at work and at play from the same webmail

for spamming from a zombie (with an IP of 111.222.123.124)

From: zombie@111.222.123.124
Subject: Stop spam now!

or it wouldn't be too much trouble to look up the MX record of 111.222.123.124 and set an appropriate From: header accordingly

This scheme is as temporary as any other and it also prevents me from sending mail with my own computer, I will have to route my mail through my ISP's mail server in order to tag on to their SPF

oh well, something's got to give

Have you looked into fastmail? The domain email hosting isn't free, but they do offer IMAP.

Especially as AFIAK Hotmail doesn't allow you to forward your emails to another account - besides, it's just be shut down after a month of "inactivity" anyway, so it's far from a sensible option.

Sounds like further justification how the sooner you make the transition, the better. It doesn't have to be overnight, but this time around choose something that will likely be higher quality in the longer-term. I'm not sure why people are so against paying for quality e-mail. For a buck or two a month, you can get high quality service with backups. My parents pay more than that for a new mail box every year when some drunk or snow plow takes it out.

mailsnare.net fastmail.fm

Anyone knows whether FastMail will follow the generous-1Gb move and when?

Exactly. But instead of using an Ad-infested megacorp email service, I use Fastmail. I use my own domains, and they all go to my Fastmail email account. If for some reason Fastmail were to go away, I would just find another provider to host my mx records.

Definitely worth $50 per year.

Also, for the tinfoil lovers in the audience, there is hushmail which I believe has been discussed here before. MUCH slower than fastmail, but very secure.

It is called Plus-addressing, and the great peopüle from Fastmail.fm have incorporated it into their systems. Many ISPs have it, but Fastmail.fm does a really good job of it.
They explain it here

With the way people move from their ISP from service to service, its nice to have a consistent email address as you float around.

But why use Hotmail? There are other, better free mail services out there.

Fastmail.FM is a good one--pretty reliable, and it even has free IMAP access. You have to provide your own SMTP server tho, if you don't want to pay Fastmail.FM for one--but that's ok...I don't know of an ISP that doesn't provide for one, anyway.

Its web-based interface is also pretty sweet--it's very sleek and minimalist (far more than Hotmail or Yahoo), and you have a choice of style sheets to choose from. You can even upload your own CSS if you don't like any of the pre-made ones.

1. POP is so 1990's. Live in the now.
2. You can get a decent provider, *with* secure IMAP and secure SMTP for less than $30/year: mailsnare.net, fastmail.fm, and they both work with Mozilla just fine (except for the RTE editor on 'snare, but their text editor works just fine.

their webmail is the best I've ever used

Best you've ever used for *free* maybe. POP is soooo 1990's. Actually, they have a very robust webmail interface and their spam filter seems quite good, but I get more spam there than any other account so I suppose it has to be. I'd rather read my e-mail from a 'net-enabled calculator than POP it.

fastmail.fm
mailsnare.net

[Yahoo's] webmail is the best I've ever used...

Damn, that's pathetic. Unless you like the flashing Horoscope buttons every time you look at your email...

You should check out a serious webmail provider, such as Fastmail.FM. I have been a happy customer for over two years. Tons of features and absolutely nothing on the page that doesn't have to do with your ability to gain information about and control your email.

I host my e-mail at Fastmail. They use SpamAssassin to filter spam, but do it in a really cool way. For example, any mail scoring greater than 4.0 is dropped into my spam folder, but mail scoring greater than 10.0 is just deleted automatically, server-side. It's pretty cool, and the thresholds are user configurable.

I don't use webmail myself, but I like having a constantly running, huge storage vault of mail that I don't want going to my main address. Gmail seems to be able to do this better than its competitors.

As much as I hate when people plug stuff in posts, I am going to do one myself.

www.fastmail.fm is THE best webmail service I have seen. It has a simple unobtrusive text interface with no banners or ads. There are both free and paid versions. With the paid versions, you can buy extra space as you need it at $20 per 100 MB. It has excellent spam protection and you can also set up alias mail addresses which can then be filtered to a folder in your main account. This is another very useful tool against spam.

I have nothing but praise for them.

The lack of fucking huge Flash and Javascript ads alone are enough to get me switching.

Try a different (better) webmail provider. Not everything is so sucky. FastMail.FM works very well for me. They actually care about their customers (gasp!). They do reserve the right to add some ads to the free guest accounts at some point, but they will work hard to make sure they aren't too disruptive. I've heard that Runbox is quite good too.

I agree (I use fastmail.fm also) It's awesome; the only option they don't really offer in there Webmail service is a calendar.

I download all my email accounts into my fastmail account (including hotmail), and just access it using WebMail/IMAP.
I think I could cope with Gmail if I could download all my other email accounts into my Gmail account.
The only problem with that is I can access my IMAP account using Mutt on a plain text terminal. With Gmail you need a browser that is JavaScript capable.

Does anyone care about encryption anymore? Is there any web mail service that offers PGPish public/private key encryption? Maybe one that's not free?

BTW, has anyone tried FastMail? They don't have encryption, but they're still pretty cool.

its fastmail.fm

GMail will have targeted ads. I haven't seen a banner ad (spam aside) since I signed up for FastMail years ago.

Why SpamCop blocking list is harmful

There already exist non-ad, non-spam, non-privacy-invading, better alternatives. I've did a great deal of research into the available, pre-packaged alternatives when I need to find a new mail provider after college.

I even sent a comment to Google about this, telling them that they will not be able to win over users like myself who are willing to pay a small fee in order to have non-privacy-invading email, with imap and ssl.

And I don't think anyone "needs" 1GB. 98% of my emails I have no interest in saving, and in fact for legal reasons - amongst others - would rather not save.

While geekmail.cc is recently deceased (due to legal problems), it offerred 200MB for $40 a year.

When they went down, I switched to fastmail.fm. My $40 per year gets me:
- hosting email for my own domain
- 150MB email capacity
- 150MB file storage capacity
- 750MB/month bandwidth
- SSL IMAP/POP3/SMTP
- Basically server-side postfix rules
- Spam filtering
- Virus attachment filtering

And once gmail gets going, it won't be long before other providers start offering 1GB of storage.

Disk space is cheap. It's the bandwidth that is expensive.

Gmail will just be the next crappy Hotmail. They won't be getting my dollars.

fastmail.fm has some proxy services which will do SMTP on any port for people in your position.

And fastmail rocks generally anyway.

Here is my solution to spam, utilizing a combination of SpamAssassin and Sieve scripting on a FastMail account.

First, I set my account to scan all incoming e-mail for viruses and trojans. Any e-mail with an infected attachment is automatically deleted. Secondly, I set SpamAssassin to mark any spam with the score 4.1 or higher and move it to a "Junk" folder. Any spam with the score 10 or higher that is sent from anyone who doesn't match my address book is automatically deleted. Any e-mail that is HTML only is rejected and sent back to the sender. Since SpamAssassin doesn't scan e-mail above 249 Kb in size, I have it set to automatically let any e-mail above that size into my Inbox, since it's *most likely* not spam. Then, any e-mail that doesn't meet any or all of the above criteria, but doesn't match any address in my address book, is filtered into a "Gray List" folder, which is periodically reviewed every two-three days or so. Only e-mails that don't meet any or all of the above with e-mail addresses that match my address book are let into my Inbox.

It's a rather complicated system, but it works. For anyone else that uses FastMail (it most likely won't work anywhere else due to FastMail's unique headers), here's my Sieve script -

require ["envelope", "fileinto", "reject", "vacation", "regex", "relational", "comparator-i;ascii-numeric"];

if header :contains "X-Spam-hits" "MIME_HTML_ONLY" {
reject "Message bounced by server content filter";
stop;
}
if anyof( header :contains "subject" "Infected file rejected", header :contains "X-Spam-hits" "FVGT_S_MULTI_OBFU_3", header :contains "X-Spam-hits" "NIGERIAN_BODY", header :contains "X-Spam-hits" "RM_sl_Parens") {
discard;
stop;
}
if not header :contains ["X-Spam-known-sender"] "yes" {
if header :value "ge" :comparator "i;ascii-numeric" ["X-Spam-score"] ["10"] {
discard;
stop;
}
if header :value "ge" :comparator "i;ascii-numeric" ["X-Spam-score"] ["4"] {
fileinto "INBOX.Junk";
stop;
}
}
if size :over 249K {
fileinto "Inbox";
} elsif not header :contains "X-Spam-known-sender" "yes" {
fileinto "INBOX.Gray List";
}

what's the alternative, Snotmail?

I've got several addresses on fastmail.fm - both at the free and the one-time-fee "Member" levels. It has most of what you ask at the "Free" level, but in order to get custom filtering and forwarding rules (and access to the raw sieve script) you need to be a "Member" - for fifteen bucks, one-time.

In terms of things I've spent fifteen bucks on, Fastmail is one of the best ones. Try the "Free" service (which in itself is a fine service), and you'll see that these guys are fully deserving of your cash. Plus, the two owners regularly read and participate in the forums, and will respond to your complaints/questions/issue directly.

fastmail.fm - call this a plug (for the record, I have no connection to these guys besides them providing email hosting for a conference I run), but I have no problem paying for a good service like FM.

fastmail.fm is a tasty treat for people trying to wean themsevles/others off hotmail or the like.

Go to their support forums, chat to the guys who own/run the company and write the code and geek out.

Three words: IMAP, FastMail, Thunderbird

Why not host your mail separately with a dedicated email provider? Since email is their business, they make sure it's reliable.

I'm rather fond of FastMail.FM, though I've heard that others like Runbox are quite good as well.

With only 1 legitimate message every few weeks, it can't be that much of a hassle to switch. Try fastmail.fm if you need a no-bullshit solution.

Have you considered fastmail.fm? It has a larger mailbox capacity (10 MB) and you get free IMAP access. Seems a lot better than the overrated hotmail or yahoo service.

Free webmail providers, by and large, blow complete donkey sack and you know it. This is a cop-out.

If it's just a matter of sending a few emails to get around a blacklisting, Hotmail or Yahoo would seem to be perfectly sufficient. They work, they send email, virtually all mailservers accept email from them. That's all you need.

Though fastmail are an outstanding free (and pay-for) webmail provider, even by my normally very critical assessment. Have a look if you haven't heard of them before.

Regarding people who would smarthost your email, I don't know what your specific needs are and I don't know where you're located and I don't know how much you're willing to pay, so it's kind of a difficult question to answer directly. Contact the small ISPs in your area and ask around at your local Linux user group. Ask your friends who run their own mailservers.

That's what I'd do. *shrug*

I think you've failed to grasp how many people were suffering from the "disease" of the spammer on your network. Those people no longer have to worry about the spammer on your network. The fact that you (presumably not a spammer) get your mail rejected from their network (along with the spammer) is not their problem. It's your problem, and you should bloody well make it your ISP's problem.

If you were recieving all the email sent out by the abuser on your network, you'd probably get a better perspective on the scale of the "disease" - and realise that the "cure" in question is a perfectly reasonable one.

BTW: you still have the choice to "simply" delete/filter the spam you receive ;-). And if you think finding and using a decent webmail provider is arduous, then... well... I think the word "arduous" must mean something very different in your part of the world.

There are plenty of webmail services that allow pop3/imap support for free

try http://www.fastmail.fm

Webmail isn't perfect, no, but it's a pretty reasonable solution for most "ordinary" end-users. By the way, you can get around the Yahoo-dropping-free-POP3 problem by using YahooPOPs, a handy little app that acts as an SMTP/POP3 gateway on your desktop machine - so you can effectively use free YahooMail with free POP3 again. If you want to. ;-)

And there are other webmail places that offer free POP3/IMAP access without the Yahoo bullshit, specifically FastMail.

Your other responses... well, no offense meant (seriously :), but they really do sound whiny. Come on, how hard is it to live without a broadband link? It's really difficult for me to muster up much sympathy for the "broadband or death" line when I've been on a 33.6k modem line for the last two years (yes, that's right - not 56k, 33.6k).

In any case, smarthosting really isn't much of a problem. You could swing a dead cat at your local Linux User's Group meeting and just about every person you hit would probably be happy to smarthost your mail for nothing. Though the usual technique is to find a clean ISP, pay them to handle it, then deduct that amount from your payment to your SPEWS-listed provider (as they're the ones that caused the problem and they aren't solving it for you).

I feel some sympathy for people in places like Brazil, where there is only one government-sponsored ISP (as far as I understand) which is a filthy sewer-pit of spam and thus blacklisted to the proverbial hell and back. They really don't have anywhere else to go. You do, though you're reluctant to admit it.

For even more features check out http://www.fastmail.fm

The best part is that it allows you to BOUNCE (yes that's right, bounce) messages after you read them.

You can be open-minded and only discard mail from tags that get abused, or paranoid and only accept mail from tags you've specifically whitelisted. You can be obvious about the tags - betty@veronica.archie.com, or subtle about them - orggl@veronica.archie.com is "betty" in rot13, or cryptographic (use tags with the correct hash, so you can robo-check them, or longer tags with elliptic-curve signatures), or creative (Annalee Newitz uses a different username at techsploitation.com on each of her newspaper columns). And of course you can seed your web pages with spammer bait, so any person or machine that sends mail to stupidharvester@username.domain.com gets blacklisted.

My comment about crypto being overkill comes from a perspective of ten years of hanging out with the Cypherpunks, and doing crypto for years before that. There are other ways crypto can be useful - Adam Back's Hashcash work (and Microsoft's recent Penny Black stuff), Digital Signatures on email to reduce forgery, or simply requiring all email to you to be digitally signed or encrypted or both because that's too much work for most spammers. You could use it to build traceability, but that's not always good, and making it mandatory, centralized, and universal is very very bad from a civil liberties perspective as well as probably unworkable.

Did it work in 10.3.1?

Mail.app has never done this properly for me. I just tried:

1. Deleting and recreating my account.
2. Turning off SSL.
3. Checking the "Automatically synchronize changed mailboxes"
4. Adding an "inbox" prefix.

...in lots of combinations, and none of them work. It is still the case that if I get mail that ends up in my inbox and mail that is filtered to one of my folders, only the one in my inbox shows up when I click 'Get New Mail'.

I guess it works for some and not others. Here is me:

OS X 10.3.2 (never worked in any previous version either)
FastMail

I like fastmail.fm (aka ftml.net, etc.). It's an excellent service and they do have free guest accounts that are similar to yahoo/hotmail.

Cheap, SPAM protection, tons of features, and option to associate your own domain

Hotmail is for spammers and people who don't know any better. I'd rather use snail mail.

This place is decent also, but FastMail is still the best.

I can recommend fastmail.fm - I found it via a /. comment, in fact. Web interface and IMAP access (working fine with Mac Mail), and a range of prices from free upwards. If you pay more, you get more space / functionality and access to the fastmail SMTP server, for ISP independence. I'll be paying for it soon, I'm sure. Since the goons at work implemented their 1/4-assed mail filter, it's been a godsend. The web interface is also nice and clean, and the whole thing has a nice white-hat feel to it. Check it out, anyway; I'll be recommending them when asked from now on.

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.

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.

There's been some talk of adding a feature like this to FastMail (i.e. accessing one's FastMail address book via LDAP).

The problem is that most mail clients have a pretty crummy LDAP implementation: they don't support user logins (so you could only offer one global directory - bad idea), LDAP+SSL or writing changes to the directory.

*sigh* Still so far from my dream PIM setup.

I think you're mistaken. When he says 'bounce spam' he doesn't mean composing a new message and sending it to the 'envelope from'. He means ensuring the spam message gets a 550 code, or something similiar, rather than 'accepting' it and trashing it later.

I think you're mistaken. When he says 'bounce spam' he doesn't mean composing a new message and sending it to the 'envelope from'. He means ensuring the spam message gets a 550 code, or something similiar, rather than 'accepting' it and trashing it later.