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Which Webmail Service Do You Use?

Posted by Cliff on from the easy-email dept.

worm eater asks: "I've been hosting my email with my web site host for some time, although a while back I used commercial services such as Yahoo! and Hotmail. I liked Yahoo!, but was disappointed to hear that they stopped offering free POP3 access. So I'm looking for a good, free webmail host for a friend of mine that supports POP3 -- because sometimes you don't want to have to deal with a web interface, no matter how well designed. And it's nice to be able to store messages indefinitely. What do you recommend?" This was last asked two years ago, but webmail is more prevalent now than it was then, so maybe better options are available. Readers interested in security with their webmail might find this discussion interesting, as well.

2 of 133 comments (clear)

  1. Use YahooPOPs! by mh_tang · · Score: 5, Informative
    http://yahoopops.sourceforge.net/

    Works great for me ever since Yahoo went to pay only for POP3 service. Open source also. From their website:

    Yahoo! Mail disabled free access to its POP3 service in April 2002. This resulted in many people (including myself) to look for alternative free POP3 services. But this exercise can be very difficult because of the fact that your Yahoo! Mail address could be with several people and informing all of them about your new email address could prove to be a nightmare.

    And then one day, I stumbled across a Perl script called FetchYahoo, which almost did what I wanted! It downloaded emails from Yahoos website and presented them in a format such that email clients like Netscape and Pine could read them. But, the format in which it saved the emails is not supported by all email clients, including the one that I use. Also, making a layman install Perl and to get a Perl script to work could be a nightmare.

    So, YahooPOPs! was born. YahooPOPs! is an open-source initiative to provide free POP3 and SMTP access to your Yahoo! Mail account. YahooPOPs! is available on the Windows and Unix platforms.

    YahooPOPs! emulates a POP3/SMTP server and enables popular email clients like Outlook, Netscape, Eudora, Mozilla, IncrediMail, Calypso, etc., to download and send emails from Yahoo! accounts.

    How do we do it you ask? Well, this application is more like a gateway. It provides a POP3/SMTP server interface at one end to talk to email clients and an HTTP client (browser) interface at the other which allows it to talk to Yahoo!

  2. Super Dimensional Fortress by An+Onimous+Cow+Herd · · Score: 5, Informative

    I highly recommend SDF. It's an OpenBSD powered, Non-Profit, unix shell account based service. They offer a webmail interface via Squirrelmail (see above posts)
    $1 gets you a lifelong membership with 20MB email (inc. web, POP, IMAP spamfiltering) and 20MB webspace (http://yourname.freeshell.org), along with all major unix shells and common typical unix utilities(elm, pine, mailx, rmail, lynx, cgi/php4 etc. etc.)

    However, if you want to financially support SDF, for a lifetime membership donation of $35, upgrade to ARPA membership and get additional web, email and /home disc storage (100MB for each!) 300MB total)

    ARPA includes compiler access (GCC, ruby, python, perl, lisp etc) and additional internet access - telnet, ssh, ftp, ytalk, irc, snarf, ICQ etc.
    Click here for more information - there's additional services available - MySQL, VPM, SSH-tunnelling, DNS, listservs, virtual hosting etc.

    SDF is not a fly-by-night service, it's a thriving community that's been around for over 16 years with hundreds of members and a lively community (bbs)
    For us European users, we've got a dedicated server at SDF-EU

    Beats every other suggestion here into a cocked hat :)