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Fortunately, there are a lot of free email providers out there. Or if you don't like having ads in your messages, you can sign up for a paid account that costs $20 a year or thereabouts. Which is a lot cheaper than keeping your AOL account open just to get email. Something a lot of people do!

Nowadays, I use a mailbox on my web hosting provider. But I used to use MailSnare, which has good IMAP support.

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!

There have been paid email providers for years. Just because something is free, doesn't mean its a bargain. Having to change your email address every time you change ISPs, overloaded servers, tiny mailbox limits, no spam filtering, bad or nonexistant web access to your email -- these are all reasons not to use a mail server, even if you don't have to pay for it. I don't think I've ever used the free mailbox that came with my ISP account. (Well, there was my first ISP, Netcom, but I actually had that mailbox before Netcom started offering Internet access.) Right now, I use a mailbox provided by my Web hosting provider. But before I had a web site I used a mailbox provider, mainly because they supported IMAP, something most ISPs don't do.

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.

spam me at krism@mailsnare.net .. please! i'm training my spam filter <g>

An IE-only interface and an integrated news client (like the one included with my current provider's webmail) when all I really want is for Yahoo to give me IMAP. I'll even pay for it, as I do with my current provider. I would switch to have Yahoo's nice interface.

POP3 is soooo 1990's.

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

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

Have you ever tried Mailsnare? It starts at $15 per year and provides SpamAssasin, POP and IMAP access (with encryption if desired) and something like 35 megs of on-server mail storage for the $15 plan. The $20 plan provides 50 megs. It also gives aliases.

Here's an anti-spam service I'd pay for.

• Have a system like Sneakemail that gives me a random email address to use for signing up for stuff on the web.
• Use Spamassassin (or a similar tool) to filter mail.
• Include all of the Sneakemail addresses in the whitelist automatically so they get through. If they start getting spam, there should be a way to set them to bounce. This makes sure that receipts and newsletters get through 100% of the time since they are often incorrectly tagged as spam.
• Anything that scores under 5 or so from Spamassassin gets delivered automatically.
• Anything else has to go through a TMDA like system to authenticate.
• A second (and third?) email address that always goes through TMDA. This would be used for mailing lists and Usenet.
• A web interface, IMAP, and POP3 for downloading mail. Allow people to forward their filtered mail to another email address also.

I think this system would have the best balance of a spam-free inbox and low risk of losing important mail. How much would I pay? I think I'd pay $5 a month if it was set up well. $10 a month is too much for sure though, unless you offer some other features. There is already a cool webmail service called MailSnare that uses TMDA for only $19.95 per year, so you'd have competition :-)

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.