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I use FastMail.FM. Frankly speaking, it rocks!

Hm, fastmail.fm states in their FAQs that they don't offer POP3 access for free accounts. In other respects though I fully suggest their service... :)

I really like FastMail. They're "the Fastest Email Service on the Planet." Free POP3 access too. Give them a try.

fastmail.fm is hands down one of the best. Supports POP and IMAP for free, but paid accounts get more storage and some other nifty features. The free account works well enough for me.

Does anyone offer a webmail services that will connect to your POP3 account?

try FastMail

Works fine for me so far. You can sign up for a limited mailbox/bandwidth account for free. Also provides IMAP, and most of what one might want.

Very fast page delivery, HTTPS for all page displays. Not found any real gripes yet, but hey, you can sign up for free. That depends on whether you can redirect your 'mail or are happy collecting POP3 email. If you want them to be MX for your domain, that costs. Still, it's an option that pleasantly surprised me very recently. YMMV

http://www.imap.cc/ a.k.a. http://www.fastmail.fm/ is my favorite. They have POP3 and SMTP for a small fee. 10M of space is included.

Why not use the MUCH better protocol IMAP, instead? Why do people keep using and expecting POP3?!?!?

, except Yahoo! Mail doesn't allow folder nesting. (And before you laugh at me for using Yahoo! Mail, can you access your mail at any web browser anywhere? How many times have you changed addresses in the last 5 years? I haven't at all.))

My own email provider (Fastmail.fm) is very proactive about eliminating spammers and has a very strict anti-spam policy; however, it has been erroneously listed on Spamcop on at least one occasion causing problems for all of its legitamite users.

Here's a great blow by blow report of one such incident by Jeremy Howard, one of the directors of the company, as well as some reasons the list doesn't work.

Don't think so. All they are doing is trying to move people to Hotmail, AFAIK the basic version of Hotmail is free and if the "email" icon on the Desktop of the default Windows install leads to a personalised Hotmail account based on th info in your MSN Messenger account then I am willing to bet that people will use it...and not go hunting for a third-party app.

Most of them? I'd guess 1%, max. If you want a great free email service try fastmail.fm. It has IMAP support so you can check it with any email client too.

Fastmail.fm offers access to hotmail just like you can get access from Outlook.

Dammit - what about may fastmail.fm account? They're the best free email service but also Australian.

My email provider (Fastmail) has a neat way of dealing with html email. I have my default view set to "text only". When if comes across an email that has only an html part, it runs the message through lynx and I see the output. I get an easy view of the message without any possible security risks. Very nice.

I use outlook because my clients use outlook (though mostly I just use the awsome web interface that fastmail.fm provides). My clients use outlook because it has great, integrated calendaring and it syncs with their various PDAs. Such is life.

I recently reviewed 7 client-side spam filters and ended up picking Spambully. It's not free and it's not perfect but for our environment (Win/outlook 2k2 w/ a weird mirapoint IMAP server and multiple PCs per user (so email needs to stay on the server)) it was the best. Very tight outlook integration (i'm a little worried about instabilities but so far it's smooth) and baysian.

But it's really just the best of a bad lot. It's great to see someone working on an open source filter that might work w/ IMAP - we can't have enough of these since right now, well, we have almost none.

I was hoping more ISPs would adopt the challenge-response system, like MailBlocks, previously featured on Slashdot. Way to go Earthlink! If I was interested in dialup, this would be a big selling point for me. I'm still waiting for a service that offers the challenge-response feature of MailBlocks but allows me to forward to my existing provider. I mean, a 12MB inbox is pretty lame. There are free providers that can give me that much space...

Try Fastmail.

It has a nice web based email system. You can check your email with IMAP or POP (pop only with paid accounts). Flexible filtering. You can create + addresses ie your address is myself@fastmail.fm you can give that iffy site myself+iffysite@fastmail.fm and then write a filter to direct all mail sent to that address to a specific folder. Paid accounts also get subdomain addressing, ie anything@myself.fastmail.fm goes to your account. All in all I have been very happy with their service and features. Oh and it can check hotmail accounts ;).

BTW, mailblocks.com isn't free; it's $10/yr. However, that's still only half what fastmail.fm charges annually for their spam filtering service (with SpamAssasin).

Well, mailblocks.com is $24.95 for 50MB, whereas FastMail.FM is $19.95 for the same size. mailblocks.com say in their TOS that they give your details to 3rd parties and send you ads, whereas FastMail.FM says they won't give your details to anyone.

(Disclaimer: I'm a director of FastMail.FM)

maybe i'm just ignorant of "how", but if something like fastmail.fm is only $20/yr, wouldn't that be waaay cheaper than having a domain?

I mean, i love the idea of having the control of your own domain, but you have the cost of registration plus at least $10-20/month or so to host the thing. Is there a cheaper way to host your own domain (if only for email purposes)?

Fastmail.fm

But Fastmail.fm allows me to use subdomain addressing. All email sent to *@username.fastmail.fm gets delivered to username@fastmail.fm.

So I give out the address "amazon@username.fastmail.fm" to amazon (just to randomly pick on someone). If I get spam at that address, I add a rule to automatically delete all email coming into that email address. Plus, I can go to amazon and tell them that I KNOW they sold me out, as I only gave out that address once. That is very worthwhile to me.

If $20/year for a quailty email account is too much for you, fastmail.fm has other options, including a $14.95 one-time fee. All info is on their page at fastmail.fm

Your mileage may vary. If you are serious about either, try them both and stick with the one you like. Me, I'm a happy fastmail customer. Although perhaps some competition may convince them to add this whitelist option.

There are also tagged versions of Unix email clients around, which let you receive messages to yourname+tag@your-isp.net, letting you do the same with tags that you did with addresses in your own domain, but surprising numbers of humans and web-forms seem unable to use those addresses correctly. (They also don't work for me, because my email forwarder doesn't know how to translate myname+tag1@emailforwarder-domain.com into myrealname+tag@my-real-isp.com.)

Fastmail.fm has a nice intermediate version, using subdomains - tag@username.fastmail.fm is equivalent to username+tag@fastmail.fm, so you can give people human-readable tagged names and do all the same processing tricks. It's pretty limited use in their free service, but has much more flexible tools in their paid service.

The other approach that helps with filter-evaders is collaborative filter nets such as Vipul's Razor or Cloudmark. Some recipients will still get stuck reading the spam, but they'll mark it so most recipients can auto-trash it.

I have gotten spam on my fastmail account, but I'm not using their spam filters. The thing that fastmail does that I haven't seen is that in addition to allowing the usual (for recent email systems) tagged login format like username+tag@fastmail.fm , which lets you give everybody email addresses with a different tag value, it also automagically translates between this and tag@username.fastmail.fm - this not only avoids confusing web forms and avoids confusing your mother, it also reduces the risk that spammers will guess that simply using the untagged "username@domain.com" will reach you.

Spam to date : zero. The only crap I get is that which is forwarded from my unexpectedly still-active university account.

FastMail has a 'bounce' option that lets you fake an 'undeliverable' error message. Good for ex-girlfriends too.

I have an SSH server set up on my DSL-connected Linux machine and pay for FastMail.fm e-mail that offers IMAP. When I want to manage my e-mail, I log on to my server from wherever I am using PuTTY (I changed the SSH port to something that most firewalls allow), and run Mutt.

I have it set up to use GPG for automatic signing -- all I do is type up an e-mail, press the send key, enter my GPG passphrase at the prompt (which is 35 alphanumeric chars,), and press Enter. My e-mail gets signed and mailed. When I receive a PGP-encrypted/signed mail, Mutt automatically decrypts it for me, again using my passphrase.

It's very convenient (setting it up is the hardest part, and that's also easy with online documentation) and very self-reliant: no special provider to go out of business, no browser to block Java, and always encryped.

If you guys haven't looked at FastMail already, you must. It is the most geek friendly email service, providing secure IMAP, POP, SMTP, huge storage, spam assassin, multiple aliases, writing your filters in sieve etc. etc. And they are fast.

Another cool feature is automatic folder redirection, where mail sent to foldername@username.fastmail.fm goes to the specified folder directly. Very good for creating new email addresses on the fly for online subscriptions. I use amazon@myusername.fastmail.fm for amazon, for example. Excellent for keeping track of who is selling your email address.

The customer support is unbelievable and you get real responses from a human usually within a couple of hours.

No I don't work for them, just another happy paying customer.

Accessing my mail through IMAP with evolution I'm a big fan of doing exactly what you said, basically testing for the spam header and displaying the mail in a different color or moving it to an alternate folder (I'm super paraoid about false-positives although I've never seen one with spamassasin).

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.

Simple solution: never rely on an ISP for your email. There are some totally hopeless ISPs out there; this woman's problems aren't a drop in the ocean. Instead, get a web-based mail account including IMAP access so you can use a non-web-based mailer. The best one on Earth is Fastmail, but you can even settle for Hotsnail or Yapoo if you must. Then, whenever your ISP dies, or you decide to dump them in favour of one that understands the concept of service and reliability, then you don't need to change your address.

The grownup version of this solution is to get your own domain name through a reliable provider of such services, and then when you change email systems you can just change a couple of MX entries or whatever and it's all done.

It can check your Hotmail account every half hour or so too if you don't want to give up your spam-harvesting mailbox. How's that for features?

NOTE: I don't work for them or have anything to do with them except being quite happy with my free account there. This is not a plug!

If this bothers you, use one of many excellent web based email providers that support secure connections.

I can totally recommend FastMail.

Though of course, if you are using IE, you are shot anyway.

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.

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.

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.

I use FastMail and have been very happy with them, they're still small enough that you can contact the developers directly and they respond promptly. I use SSL IMAP but they support SSL for POP as well.

I don't think you necessarily need to own your own domain. There are some excellent pay for e-mail sites that support IMAP (sorry, POP sucks for me):

-> http://www.fastmail.fm - This is my provider. Excellent features, and you can even set your MX pointer to point to them. $20/year I think for 100MB IMAP + tons of features. Totally bad-ass.

-> http://www.mailsnare.net - I had a friend who went through these people, and although they don't support MX pointers, they seem to offer some pretty good bang for your buck. How about 100MB IMAP account for $15/year (+ setup fee)? At that price, why would anyone use Hotmail except for garbage accounts?

FastMail.fm also offer free accounts with 10MB. I would trust them more than Microsoft. Of course, it's cheap to upgrade your account and you get tons of cool features.

an old address that I used 10 years ago to post on usenet

the address that I used when registering my domain

I think it's somewhat heartening that most companies that I have any real business or interaction with have properly protected my email address, the spam seems to come almost entirely from various types of harvesters.

I tell ya what I would pay a for, the ability to remove the stupid yahoo advertisements from the bottom of my emails (you can pay another 20$ a year to do this via pop3 but it dosen't effect your webmail).

• SSL for POP, IMAP, Web, and SMTP: Yes
• SMTP auth so you can send from anywhere: Yes
• Forward to and from other accounts: Yes
• Fetch from other accounts: Yes
• Disk storage: 10MB free, $25 for 100MB one-time upgrade fee
• Download for archiving: Yes, there is a function on the web interface to have the server zip all messages before date x in folder y and download them to you, optionally deleting them after sending

Fastmail is a service that includes IMAP and Webmail in their free service. They also are about to drop POP3 from the free service. But, there's an option for a 1 time $10 fee for full access to SMTP.

The best thing about it is, they're using Linux. :)

Incidentally, you can buy domain-based E-mail redirection [dnscentral.com] for about $20 per year. So you can buy your own domain (maybe in .nom) just for forwarding purposes.

This is a good idea. But you can do it cheaper, with extremely reliable providers. You can get MX records or full forwarding for free from ZoneEdit. And you can get a domain for just $9 from GoDaddy. And you can forward it to account which you can access using IMAP with any mail client, or using the web, by using FastMail.FM.

This setup is that currently recommended by most of the community at http://www.emaildiscussions.com, which is the best place to find out about effective use of email.

We considered moving to Postgres for FastMail.FM as well because of the row locking issue. But instead we moved to MySQL with the InnoDB backend (which also drives Slashdot). We've found it works extremely well, and actually doing the upgrade was just a case of running 'ALTER TABLE TableName TYPE=InnoDB' for each table. InnoDB comes with the standard 4.0 binary now too, so you don't have to separately get the -max binary or compile it in yourself. And InnoDB supports multiple files over separate disks (including putting the log on a separate disk of course) so you don't have to worry about converting to RAID.

I have found two solutions:

www.mail.com
www.graffiti.net

Both provide free email excellent (and web hosting) service, and are smart enough to not run Microsoft products.

Neither of these comes close to:
fastmail.fm
which gives you IMAP access to your email, so you can manage all of your email folders from Outlook Express, mozilla-mail, KMail, etc and then see those same folders and messages on the web.

And it has no graphics, and appends no tag-line to outgoing emails, and lets you set your reply-to address to whatever you like...

You can use fastmail.fm. They don't have everything you want just yet, but they certainly have a good secure web-mail service, and I understand secure POP/IMAP is coming in the next month.

Their primary servers are in the US, and secondaries in Australia, so it would be an impressive disaster that made mail undeliverable! fastmail.fm uses Postfix and Cyrus, which are widely considered the most robust mail servers, and are rarely installed at ISPs due to the technical challenge in installing them.

You'll see that their pages have no graphics or ads at all, so they certainly don't look like your average commercially driven entity!