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Don't be a cheapskate, pay for FastMail or other decent pay-for email provider. Sign up for a personal domain, most services throw in email accounts for free with a domain, or forward to your FastMail account. Then you are completely independent of the vagaries of the free providers, and you can keep your email addresses regardless of whatever provider or ISP you use, and it will cost very little (~$30/year depending on your choice of domain).

If you insist on free, well, you get what you pay for.

> And if anyone can suggest a reliable email provider that is NOT Google, MS or Yahoo, I am all ears. ========= Give these guys a try: https://www.fastmail.fm/

Have you tried FastMail? We updated the web UI today to make it work more efficiently on small screens (phones and the like), and it has a fairly complete keyboard shortcut set.

http://blog.fastmail.fm/2013/10/21/faster-than-native-introducing-fastmails-new-mobile-web-interface/

Free trial, but definitely paid. You're the customer with us, not the product.

Even simpler: sign up with fastmail.fm for only $4.95/year, and nobody will rummage through your emails. If you are not willing to spare this miniscule amount, have you any right to be incensed that Google tries to extract some value from you through ads on their totally free service?

Most fonts appear to have smoother edges and more consistent curves when rendered as black-text-on-white background, which is why that is the default ...

Er, what?

The web colour scheme was around since well before anti-aliasing was common. And has been annoying all that time. If it was easier to read, why would most sysadmins have green-on-black coloured xterms?

I did once compile xdark, and you can invoke "xdark 1 0" to reverse video the entire screen, but I never got into the habit of using it regularly. I just try to minimise my time on the web instead (haha, yeah nah).

You might want to put a keybinding into your window manager to toggle invocations of "xdark 1 0" and "xdark 0 1" for those moments when you need accurate colour representation.

Heck, some of my laptop screens have been too bright on their darkest setting. Then you run "xdark 0 0.4" to give you a bit of relief.

I pay for my email now, because I want to be someone's customer, not someone's product

Fastmail is great. No ads, a decent Web UI when I want it, and a dedicated sysadmin team that does nothing but mail. All the Bayesian filtering, Sieve rules and DKIM signing you could want. Plus, I keep my conversations and business dealings out of Google's maw (although it's hard to avoid people who use GMail), and there's Yubikey authentication for when I'm on someone else's machine.

fastmail.fm (full disclosure: referral link included)

I have administered mail servers professionally before and have quite a bit of experience with it. If I'm not being paid to do it I'm sure as hell paying someone else to deal with the hassle.

I'm afraid we removed it a while back for reasons well described in the blog post about it.

http://blog.fastmail.fm/2009/04/15/removal-of-bounce-feature-from-web-interface/

Removal of "bounce" feature from web interface
April 15, 2009 - Rob Mueller

For a long time, FastMail has had a âoebounceâ action in the web interface. When applied to email(s), it would generate a standard looking âoebounceâ email back to the sender, making it look like the original email delivery had failed.

This feature has now been removed from the web interface because it now causes many more problems than it solves.

The problem is that when the feature was first created, most emails had valid âoeFromâ addresses. These days the âoeFromâ address on most unwanted emails are forged and random, so bouncing an email really just generates backscatter emails, which themselves are considered spam. So rather than stopping spam, the bounce feature actually just generates more spam to other people!

On top of that, the bounces can cause our servers to be listed on IP blacklists. For instance, a user bouncing a large number of messages over a couple of days several months back caused most of our outgoing server IPs to be listed at http://www.backscatterer.org/. Having any of our outgoing server IPs listed on any RBL blacklist is a bad thing, because there are always systems out there using obscure RBLs like this (and worse, sometimes incorrectly configuring them to reject all email rather than just postmaster empty address bounce emails), which then means other users get emails theyâ(TM)re trying to send bounced, which is always bad.

Although there are one or two cases where bouncing might be useful, theyâ(TM)re rare compared to what people are actually doing, and these days, itâ(TM)s much better to do the following actions:

* For spam, just use the âoeReport spamâ action to help train your personal bayes database to better recognise spam in the future
* For unwanted email repeatedly from the same sender, just go to Options -> Define Rules and create a discard rule to delete any future email from that sender

We're owned by Opera Software, see http://www.opera.com/press/releases/2010/04/30/ and http://blog.fastmail.fm/2010/04/30/fastmail-fm-has-been-acquired-by-opera-software/

We have always disabled free accounts after 120 days of inactivity, it's right there in the information available you sign up:

https://www.fastmail.fm/pages/fastmail/docs/pricingtbl.html

When the account gets closed, the emails get discarded - we don't hold your data forever.

Yahoo! (oops, I think I infringed somebody)

We're owned by Opera Software, see http://www.opera.com/press/releases/2010/04/30/ and http://blog.fastmail.fm/2010/04/30/fastmail-fm-has-been-acquired-by-opera-software/

We have always disabled free accounts after 120 days of inactivity, it's right there in the information available you sign up:

https://www.fastmail.fm/pages/fastmail/docs/pricingtbl.html

When the account gets closed, the emails get discarded - we don't hold your data forever.

Yahoo! (oops, I think I infringed somebody)

...these guys:
http://fastmail.fm/

I think their staff frequent /., at least they have in the past. I'm not using them yet, but I keep the link handy for the day when I get kicked off my current server.

I hate to start a fanboy thread, but not enough not to do it. I have been using http://www.fastmail.fm/ [Fastmail] and love it. Not free, but is freaky fast and extra features that make mail management easier.

I believe the Opera Australia division bought it, so its likely to bound by Australian privacy laws (maybe just under a different state jurisdiction?), but they are already moving staff to Norway.

What if I don’t want Opera to take over my account?
Go to http://www.fastmail.fm/ login to your account, then go to the Options -> Cancel Account screen and enter your password to confirm you want to cancel your account.

http://blog.fastmail.fm/2010/01/06/truedomain-anti-phishing-and-email-authentication/

describes the way Truedomain operates. We run a milter which applies X-Truedomain-* headers (view source on those messages - you'll see that even the Logo image is added a per-message basis as a Base64 encoded header)

We're also planning to colour messages from known senders (in your address book) and offer a link to the address book entry that caused them to be trusted, as well as labelling messages that have gone entirely through a trusted path. I added a bunch of extra headers to the list that Cyrus caches on the fast metadata drives to support all this just last week! We've been beta testing Truedomain for a while on one of our incoming MX servers, and it's now applied to all incoming email.

One thing that people often don't pay attention to is that fastmail.fm does a lot of Open Source work. One of the fastmail.fm crew, Bron Gondwana, has made extremely important contributions to the world's best, most scalable libre-software mail spool, Cyrus IMAP. He has commit rights upstream, and he has been a very active contributor and member of the community for a few years, now. fastmail.fm is a Cyrus IMAP shop, but they help other Cyrus IMAP users all the time in Cyrus the mailing lists, they have given us details about how to set up highly scalable and redundant multi-million-user setups many times now... And it is not rare to see Bron on the LKML (Linux Kernel ML) engaging the kernel developers to fix a kernel bug or two.

This is no publicity stunt, these guys are it: the email shop anyone who likes to tout around about the importance of FLOSS should vote for with their wallets.

Many thanks for these kind words - and thanks too for pointing out Bron's great work.

We're at a point now where every single piece of software we use, bar one, is open source. (The one exception is the RAID-monitoring tool that IBM requires for monitoring their RAID hardware.) Everything else, from programming languages, to operating systems, to system monitoring, email servers, web servers, anti-virus, anti-spam, and so on and so on, is all open source.

The reason we use open source for everything is that we can (and do) hack at the source to add features and fix bugs, we get direct access to the actual developers when we need help, we never have to rely on a third party to fix problems, and we get all the security benefits too.

For those who are interested, we have some more details on FastMail.FM's software (and hardware) infrastructure on our site.

    Jeremy Howard
    FastMail.FM

fastmail.net is pretty good - we've had that for a few years now. Sadly we don't have .com. Plenty of other .coms though:

http://www.fastmail.fm/help/signup_domains.html

Well now you have heard of them. If you take your email seriously, this is a service you should seriously look into. These guys grokked IMAP from the very beginning. Also keep in mind that their business depends on providing good email service. Your ISP only provides email services so that you get locked into their domain name for your address.

I had really shopped around for email services (as well as running my own on a VPS for a while) before settling on fastmail many years ago. Fastmail runs the kind of system that I would have like to design.

Other than as a very happy (and a very demanding) customer, I have no connection to Fastmail. But if you haven't heard of them you should check them out.

When I hear "best webmail service" I think of fastmail, not google.

It's because Add-Remove is trying to guess a whole lot of missing information.
http://blogs.msdn.com/oldnewthing/archive/2004/07/09/178342.aspx

One without the guessing:
http://aaronlawrence.fastmail.fm/AddRemove.html

IMAPSize is an application for IMAP account management (unlike an email client that would sync with your IMAP account, possibly instructing the server to delete things, IMAPSize backup function only copies and backups. Backups can be incremental, of course. And there's other functionality too, like Attachment removal or header modification).

I know it works with Gmail (used it) though I use it mainly with my fastmail.fm account.

Until this fall, our university was maintaining one of, if not the largest, Cyrus mail system in the world. Over 50,000 mailboxes generating an average of 4,000,000 transactions a day (peaking at 5,000,000), hosted on a cluster of SunFire servers and StorEdge/StorageTek SAN.

You were nowhere near to being the largest Cyrus installation. I would guess that my company, FastMail, is the largest. And I'll give you a hint - your university missed the whole point of how to run a successful Cyrus installation. Maybe next time they should hire some sysadmins who know what they're doing...

Try Fastmail.fm's family account. The features are available here: http://fastmail.fm/pages/fastmail/docs/features.html#family They have very good spam filters. You can even write your own anti-spam script.

Best you can do is sign up to something like FastMail, jack up the spam filtering to aggressive or whitelist-only (bit nazi, but if you really want control...).

Actually, FastMail can help more than that - there's a new family email package which lets the parents configure their kids' accounts, and also lets them look at their mailboxes, so they can supervise their usage.

Disclaimer: I'm an owner of FastMail.

Best you can do is sign up to something like FastMail, jack up the spam filtering to aggressive or whitelist-only (bit nazi, but if you really want control...).

Actually, FastMail can help more than that - there's a new family email package which lets the parents configure their kids' accounts, and also lets them look at their mailboxes, so they can supervise their usage.

Disclaimer: I'm an owner of FastMail.

Do you filter their web access as well? Otherwise just face the fact that once they're online, they're probably going to see some shit you'd rather they didn't see once in a while, live with it.

Best you can do is sign up to something like FastMail, jack up the spam filtering to aggressive or whitelist-only (bit nazi, but if you really want control...).

http://www.fastmail.fm/pages/fastmail/docs/reliability.html

Our last big outage was last time we had a 2TB single Cyrus instance. Do you know how long it takes to fsck 2TB on slow SATA RADI6? Neither did I until we did that. Over a week.

Basically, we lost 2 drives and had a third throwing errors within a few hours. It happens more often than you'd think. That was the last straw for the big partition idea.

We now have 300Gb data partitions, and Cyrus replication (check the mailing lists, I have written a ton of patches to Cyrus over the past couple of years - the only remaining issue with replication is it sometimes loses folder subscription information - but we run a weekly full replication check that notices that and fixes it)

And yeah - our staff read slashdot!

The webmail is the old-school bit -- no AJAX, but you can edit Sieve scripts and do lots of other fun stuff from the Options screen. I recommend them.

And apparently the owners read Slashdot. Oh wait, that's me! ;) OK, so that makes me a little biased...

But I should add to your comments above that a new interface full of Javascripty goodness is on the way - it should be in beta in the next couple of weeks. You can see a mockup here: http://mockups.neilj.fastmail.fm/revision30/inbox.html (some things like the images on buttons aren't working in the mockup). There's lots of keyboard shortcuts, like '/' to search, and '.' to bring up an action menu. And of course, being FastMail, it downgrades gracefully - so if you don't have Javascript you can still use every feature.

To find out what other folks are saying, see this thread on the (independently run) FastMail forum: http://www.emaildiscussions.com/showthread.php?t=1560. It has over 300 comments about the service, written over the last seven years.

http://www.fastmail.fm/ is still around, for a reasonnable 40$/year, and is a very good option which provides pretty much any feature you might want...

Actually, even the $20/year option is quite rich.

Other than just hopping on the pro-fastmail bandwagon, I would add that it does a few things I really like:
- Aliases that work well
- Good reply-to functionality
- BEST keyboard-only message navigation since... Pine

I signed up years ago for the IMAP and the reply-to (so I can hand out my university alumn email), but I don't really use the IMAP, the web interface is so good.

Lastly, if you've got fastmail, I recommend (fastcheck), a freeware mail notifier.

I absolutely recommend fastmail. Fastmail is the system that I would have liked to design. They really understand IMAP and they have the only webmail interface that doesn't make my skin crawl. I am extremely picky about email (I professionally set up email systems for small and medium sized businesses, and I've been a happy fastmail customer for about seven years.

Even if you don't pick fastmail, you should get your own domain name that you use for email. Typically your domain registrar will allow you to set up forwarding to whatever addresses you wish. This way, you aren't locked into your ISP or other email hoster if you wish to change. If I stopped liking fastmail tomorrow, I could easily switch to another provider by just changing a few DNS records. I've had ISPs and hosting companies screw up my mail before, and I enjoy the freedom to switch if necessary. Though I don't anticipate switching from fastmail whom I've been with for about seven years.

Let me also state why one shouldn't use your ISP's system. Your ISP doesn't win or lose customers by the quality of their email service. For them, email is nothing but an added expense which they run because they "have to" and because it creates a lock-in opportunity. This also applies Gmail. Who knows what their business model is, but keeping email customers happy probably isn't the core of it.

Free services (yahoo, gmail, hotmail etc.) have the caveats of free services: You get little support; Terms and Conditions change more rapidly than most others; advertisements; crappy IMAP support; and they are used by spammers leading to all mail from those services being more likely to be filtered. Fastmail does offer a "free" (advertising supported) service, but I've never used that.

There are some competitors to fastmail. You should look them up as well. The last time I seriously looked at these (2004) to provide a recommendations for a client, fastmail was still the best bet IMO.

Other than being a happy customer, I have no connection to fastmail.

Honestly, I'm a little surprised you've got to ask this question, since there are so many options out there...

First off, there's Google Apps. I know you said that it was never intended for home use, but I don't see why that matters. I've got a personal domain that I registered through GoDaddy a few years back, and have pointed the email service at Google's stuff. It took about 10 minutes to set up. I've only got about 5 email accounts that I'm using. I've got craptons of storage, nice webmail, POP3, IMAP, and all sorts of other stuff I'll never use (GTalk, Sites, whatever). If you're looking for free/cheap email you really ought to look at Google's offerings - all you need is a domain.

If you're looking to register a domain, GoDaddy has them cheap and I've had no trouble with them so far. They also provide email if you want it. They're cheap. I pay about $50/year for some web hosting and the domain name, and I had more email accounts than I would ever use. I switched to the Google Apps largely because I prefer their webmail - the stuff at GoDaddy is pretty crappy. But if all you want is POP3 or IMAP they're certainly an option.

There are also other companies out there that will sell you email service... One that I've heard good things about, but never used, is Fastmail.

Plus, just about any hosting company will sell you email service.

http://www.fastmail.fm/ is still around, for a reasonnable 40$/year, and is a very good option which provides pretty much any feature you might want...

> And GMail is the best of all webmails, so they sure made a good choice!

I still prefer Fastmail.fm's web interface.

Having said that, I haven't used GMail in anger, and I hear it takes a while to get used to it's, er, unusual way of doing things.

Fastmail.fm have free accounts, so it's easy to 'try out', but I chose to pay for five year's worth of 'Enhanced' service - though my renewal comes up next year, so that'll be where I have to put my money where my mouth is (again).

I am sure that there are other services, but I haven't used dialup for years. I have been using fastmail since I had dialup.

My mail provider, Fastmail.fm defends against false backscatter messages. Here is their method:
http://www.fastmail.fm/docs/faqparts/SpamSettings.htm#JunkBackscatter

For one thing, they involve a certain sort of lock-in. For another, the ASP never do the jobs as well as dedicated email or hosting companies.

Get your own domain name, so that you can switch providers (hosting and email) if you need to. Most people here know this, but I deal regularly with lots of people who even run their businesses with email addresses at verizon.net or charter.net or comcast or even AoL. I've been preaching this for a long time. I will certainly use this case as a frightening example.

Personally, I'm a fan of fastmail.fm which is the best IMAP provider I know. Years ago they did have reliability problems with downtime in the past, but their back-ups were rock solid. And they are very open with users about what kinds of redundancy, back-up and disaster recovery systems they have in place. And, of course, they will (for a fee) host the MX for your domain, so you aren't locked into them.

so much so that I spend a lot of my time enhancing and bugfixing Cyrus

For half a decade you could get good IMAP accounts from the likes of GeneticMail (Everything via SSL... LDAP address book XMPP IM years before google talk, etc.) or FastMail, or even Apple. Now, for the glory of having ads along with your junk mail, here is google... As usual, google impresses people without actually offering anything impressive at all. I suppose that's genius of a sort.

I don't much like the labels either.

I've been a satisfied Fastmail user for several years now. Apart from gmail being free (FM has free accounts too, but they're ad supported or something - I pay for their premium service), I don't see any advantage in their interface.

I wonder if this new imap service will help people who already have stuff in folders (like me) move to gmail? I tried gmail a while ago and it was a pain to set it up to do the same as fastmail was doing automatically (ie use plus-addressing). Perhaps I'll give it another try, afterall, free is good.

I use IMAP based mailboxes and like 4-5 different mail clients. I reject anything offering that horrible outdated protocol (pop3) even if it is "free" as Gmail.

I also unsubscribed from "Yahoo Plus" stating they should offer IMAP option for money and give free pop3 to ordinary users.

In fact, in 2007, you should even demand IMAP IDLE extension support with SSL/TLS. Amazing is, they could save huge money/bandwidth if they used IMAP as explained at
http://www.fastmail.fm/docs/faqparts/ExternalMail. htm#ExternalIMAPVsPOP
They insist on POP3, I heard from a credible postmaster that the main reason is Outlook Express and its horrible IMAP support. I am not sure if it is the deal but if we don't have w3c valid pages and transparent PNG just because IE (pre 7?) didn't support them, it makes sense.

To hell with all of them: use fastmail. No bullshit, PERIOD.

Check out FastMail.

Even RAID6 isn't always enough:

http://blog.fastmail.fm/?p=521

Which is why (as suggested in another thread) we use Cyrus replication now for people's email. That has its own collection of "issues" - I've probably written at least half the bugfixes that have been merged into the past couple of releases to get it stable - but it's a whole lot better than relying on a single disk unit.

We had another failure where the RAID controller went psycho and decided to lie about the status of drives, it failed 5 of them in quick succession on a single RAID6 unit, and the worst thing is we actually replaced some before we gave up and switched RAID controllers, so we lost the volume. No knowing how corrupted it would have been anyway.

The difference between Fastmail and Gmail is that Gmail is run by a billion dollars corporation with huge infrastructure and has about 30,000,000 subscribers and FastMail.FM is run by a few developers on two racks with open source software and has only a 1,000,000 subscribers (perhaps a bit less).

And the main difference is that if you contact Gmail with a question or suggestion you get a form reply (to their credit they never called back but they did implement some of the suggestions I made). When you contact FastMail you usually get a reply from a developer and often the reply is something like ,"login to /beta/ and see if it works now". There are advantages and disadvantages to this.

There are people using both FastMail and Gmail (like I do) and enjoy both worlds. Both allow forwarding (free FastMail accounts require a little hacking that is documented in the FastMail wiki to do it) and cross-forwarding works great (both have duplicate suppression. In FastMail it is a documented fact. In Gmail it seems to work). There are people who like Gmail's interface better, and there are people who like FastMail's interface better, and of course FastMail has IMAP functionality on all membership levels including free accounts, so you can choose your interface. FastMail's interface is much geekier, but I guess for many Slashdotters this is an advantage.

I think Fastmail is worth checking out by Slashdotters at least to see how much functinality can be crammed into one webmail client. So go to Fastmail.FM and try it . Even if you don't adopt it as your main account you'd probably enjoy the experience and find some uses for it. (And if you don't want them to know I sent you remove the STKI parameter from the URL. Unlike Gmail, FastMail would not disclose to me who used my referal but only how many people used it).

I have a fastmail.fm account, I'm a "Full" member, so I pay a subscription (every three years iirc).

GMail's spam filtering doesn't compare to FastMail's at the "Full" level, I can't comment on the free account level. I very very rarely have a false-positive with FastMail's spam filtering, and it very rarely misses spam. At my service level you can define your own rulesets as well if that's your thing. Also, in my experience FastMail.fm is significantly faster than GMail, and works with more browsers. I can use links or lynx if I want to with FastMail.fm depending on my environment.

Personally I only use GMail as an account I use when I signup for things I may not use often, mailing lists for various open source projects, etc. For anything serious/important. I greatly prefer FastMail.

Maybe I'm old-fashioned, but I like defining rules and using "folders" more than GMails tagging approach. FastMail.fm also has an impeccable service record. They have a "blog" here for up-to-date goings-on, and there is http://fastmail.fm/beta/ which is what I use as it occasionally offers features that haven't gone mainstream yet.

I have a fastmail.fm account, I'm a "Full" member, so I pay a subscription (every three years iirc).

GMail's spam filtering doesn't compare to FastMail's at the "Full" level, I can't comment on the free account level. I very very rarely have a false-positive with FastMail's spam filtering, and it very rarely misses spam. At my service level you can define your own rulesets as well if that's your thing. Also, in my experience FastMail.fm is significantly faster than GMail, and works with more browsers. I can use links or lynx if I want to with FastMail.fm depending on my environment.

Personally I only use GMail as an account I use when I signup for things I may not use often, mailing lists for various open source projects, etc. For anything serious/important. I greatly prefer FastMail.

Maybe I'm old-fashioned, but I like defining rules and using "folders" more than GMails tagging approach. FastMail.fm also has an impeccable service record. They have a "blog" here for up-to-date goings-on, and there is http://fastmail.fm/beta/ which is what I use as it occasionally offers features that haven't gone mainstream yet.

There's an interesting artical at Extreem tech about the wave of spam that hit us last year:
http://www.extremetech.com/article2/0,1697,2060277 ,00.asp

Most admins were able to find ways to eliminate that eventually: http://blog.fastmail.fm/?p=580

but now I notice a new trend. Some spammers are actually putting news headlines in the subject field.

On top of that the black hats are now finding ways to spam emule search results.

Every search you make in Emule will return a fake hit... something like *_using_emule_multimedia_toolbar.exe. If you exectute that program your machine will be infected with a virus.

There is a problem.

That "blog" doesn't uncover anything interesting, yes a free mail service has ads and new Ajax etc. stuff needs CPU/RAM to handle unlike old webmail. Big deal...

It is posted to blog right after Yahoo opens the API and create some good media.

Yahoo mail could be irritating (I cancelled plus after figuring no APOP or IMAP) but it is a very popular webmail internationally.

Check http://www.senderbase.org/ and look at their place in legit (non spam/zombie) providers. Where is Google?

Is Google playing "evil" games now with some anonymous blogs?

Who is that guy claiming a thing which any serious power user/developer will laugh? "why do Windows filesystems suck so?" (older entry)

No, Windows file systems, especially NTFS 5+ (2k,xp) does NOT suck. They are very modern systems and I am a OS X user saying it. Go ask any developer who isn't zealot, they will say too.

I mean why this Anonymous Blog entry submitted by AC poster is front page of Slashdot?

There is one mail service needing much more popularity and users, http://www.fastmail.fm/ , now THAT is a webmail/imap service worth reviewing.

I've had good luck with fastmail.fm.

I've had good luck with fastmail.fm as well but I'm not having good luck with them right now. I've not been able to check my fastmail.fm mail since Wed. night. And, according to their blog:

At the moment, it looks like it will take another 30 hours to finish checking the filesystem, at which point hopefully we'll be able to get these users working again.

"Hopefully"?!? You do not want to hear engineers saying that word. And 30 hours from the time of that post in my timezone means Fri. at 8:10 PM. I will have been out of my fastmail.fm email for close to 40 hours at that point.

Think twice about fastmail.fm.

gMail is about the only (non-ISP) web mail service that also provides access via eMail clients, eg, Eudora, OE, etc.

FastMail does. At the "Guest" (free) and "Member" (one-time $14.95 fee) levels, it's web and IMAP only, but at higher levels, POP3 is available as well. I'm an Enhanced level user, myself (disclosure: link gives me credit for anyone that signs up through it).

So, using a "real" eMail client, no cookies aer required.

QED ;-)

You keep using that TLA.... I do not think it means what you think it means. ;)

-Mike

https://www.fastmail.fm/

SSL { Webmail / IMAP / POP3 }