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Ask Slashdot: Advice For a Yahoo Mail Refugee
New submitter ma1wrbu5tr writes: Very shortly after the announcement of Verizon's acquisition of Yahoo, two things happened that caught my attention. First, I was sent an email that basically said "these are our new Terms of Service and if you don't agree to them, you have until June 8th to close your account". Subsequently, I noticed that when working in my mailbox via the browser, I kept seeing messages in the status bar saying "uploading..." and "upload complete". I understand that Y! has started advertising heavily in the webmail app but I find these "uploads" disturbing. I've since broken out a pop client and have downloaded 15 years worth of mail and am going through to ensure there are no other online accounts tied to that address. My question to slashdotters is this: "What paid or free secure email service do you recommend as a replacement and why?" I'm on the hunt for an email service that supports encryption, has a good Privacy Policy, and doesn't have a history of breaches or allowing snooping.
Use gmail.
Run your own mail server, that's the only way you can be reasonably sure that you have control over your mail.
If builders built buildings the way programmers wrote programs, then the first woodpecker would destroy civilization.
People are REALLY going to hate this, but there is no 100% secure network service. Computer networks were designed for sharing information between nodes. The idea of keeping others out of that sharing was added on later. On a large interconnected network like the Internet it is impossible to do 100%. I can feel the nerd rage boiling here and the claims that "you don't know what you are talking about!". But save it. Reality tells us otherwise. If it is on a network, it isn't secure.
has a good Privacy Policy and free
Don't match in my experience.
If you want privacy, isn't email the wrong tool? Isn't email like a post card that anyone can read in transit?
If you want private communications, look for a different way, a private way, to communicate.
If you want convenient email for casual use, try GMail. For example, Google will find things in your email, like confirmation emails of your upcoming flights, and then Google will be sure to remind you on your smart phone. But I don't treat communication with my airline the same as I might treat communication with other parties.
I'll see your senator, and I'll raise you two judges.
I haven't had any issues. Unless they make major changes, I see no reason to move on.
If you are trusting someone else to manage your email, you will never be sure someone isn't reading your emails. Simple as that. I'd go with Google since they are at least open about what they do with your emails. Or at least as far as I know.... which is all you can say about any free or paid service.
Now setting up your own email service isn't all that terribly hard. If you really care about your security, that is the way you will go. Otherwise, you just figure out who you distrust the least.
Not free, but it works well. Note: Servers are in NY.
Don't bother with any free service which will basically allow for the always respectful, honourable, "authorities" to check your e-mail whenever they feel like it. Use encrypted e-mail through www.unseen.is.
ProtonMail out of Switzerland is pretty good and seems to be pretty secure.
https://protonmail.com/
--Hired Net Grunt
I use Apple for personal email. I have had a mac.com email address since Apple came out with it. Their current server name is "me.com" and Apple does not advertise in this service, as it is a paid-for service. It allows pop3 as well as IMAP.
For professional email, I use gmail. Google does a great job of excising spam. It is advertiser-supported email, but I never use a web browser for my gmail account. Instead, I use the pop3 function. It propagates to my cell phone, my desktop and my tablet. When I delete something on my cell phone, it deletes on my tablet, but not on my desktop. For a free service, I do not think you can do any better than gmail.
Gods don't kill people, people with gods kill people.
It's fairly trivial to export your messages. You can copy them someplace local via any IMAP client. Contacts from Yahoo aren't bad either, since it'll make a .CSV for you. Putting the messages back on another service isn't horrible once you have those things under your own control.
-- I wanna decide who lives and who dies - Crow T. Robot, MST3K
I've got 2 gmail accounts (no, snotnose@gmal.com is not one of them). I connect to them via Thunderbird, which downloads the messages to my local hard drive. It's worked like a champ for some 8 years or so.
Fastmail for the win. Reasonably priced, don't think they are going anywhere and have been ultra-reliable. I've been with them about 15 years.
I've had a yahoo address so long, it still ends in @sbcglobal.net All I use it for is online garbage...let all the junk go there from sites that require an email address to do anything.
I think this is really the important bit.
The OP obviously is looking for an email service that is completely different from the one they are migrating from, however expect that it will exist, and probably want it for approximately the same cost (near zero)
I think this may be asking too much.
For a good alternative to Yahoo mail, you could use Gmail, it has all of the same security issues as Yahoo but I don't think it is in any way worse (and arguably I do trust google more than I trust yahoo, though that doesn't say much) and gmail, simply due to it's popularity, does have a lot of functionality (either native, or third party) so there is that.
Google also doesn't have much of a history of data breaches, and they seem to allow no more government snooping than any other company (which again doesn't say much)
Is that you?
"has a good Privacy Policy, and doesn't have a history of breaches or allowing snooping." -- Runbox fits all of those. Norwegians have very strong laws regarding privacy, which should please you, and the company doesn't do any advertising or crawling through your emails for tracking or anything like that. It's not a free service nor is it the cheapest one available, but I've been their customer for several years and I would at least recommend one to take a look at their offerings.
I have used G Suite for several years - Gmail running my domain's email. I get even more storage than regular Gmail, no ads, and I can still access my mail as an Exchange account on my iPhone so I can get push mail on Apple Mail. Before that, I had a hosted Exchange account with GoDaddy that did the job alright. Today if I wanted to go the hosted Exchange route I'd probably just do Microsoft Office 365's business plans that include email - either the $5 one that just gives you Exchange and OneDrive, or the $12.50 version that gets you all the Office applications as well. It looks like Microsoft offers something called Exchange Online that is just email with no OneDrive, in a couple of flavors. Which way you go depends on how you feel about Google and Microsoft. Microsoft's solutions will naturally play better with Outlook, if that is important to you.
You don't want any of the free offerings (like Gmail) then. As far as I know, every mail service that is free does snooping for advertising, whether it's directly in their web client or used elsewhere.
I don't have any paid services to recommend (and even these may or may not come with data slurping) but you could always try rolling your own. Domain names are cheap ($10-$20/yr depending on who you get it through) and many domain registrars offer some sort of mail-setup that can vary greatly in price. GoDaddy is not a registrar I'd recommend, but for an example their e-mail service starts at $5/mo normally.
You could also throw together your own mail server, but my understanding is that a lot of ISPs (in the US, which I presume is your country) are not happy with customers hosting anything regularly. Most shared website hosting plans come with some sort of e-mail service, but the abilities and prices can vary tremendously.
Just know that if you roll your own you'll probably have to be a lot more hands on with things like spam, which can have varying degrees of annoyance depending on the method. With your own domain name you can also do neat things like per-registration routing (Gmail allows username+whatever@gmail.com, but a lot of sites don't accept that as a valid e-mail address) and it looks much better in business use. Having a site where you can host random things can also be handy from time-to-time.
The main issue with e-mail is that it has two parties involved. If either of the parties is compromised in a communication, then it doesn't matter how secure the other party is. Due to the sheer volume of people using Gmail, it is likely they already have a copy of most of your mail anyway. By using Gmail just like so many other people, you at least only have one system potentially snooping on you. If you believe that you are more secure using other systems, you are likely wrong.
You could create your own website and use the email services that come with the hosting package.
Never mind the transport. That will always be compromised. Depend on the security of the strongbox. Understand the motivations of the developer (spyware, compromised by the NSA, Chinese or both) and issues related to secure key exchange.
Have gnu, will travel.
Look, email is not secure. Not at all. Any other way to thinking about it is a lie.
You see, email has to connect with just anybody. That means you can't exchange email freely, you have to have an agreed security frame work if you want email to work. Even TLS is no real protection.
That being said, I'll upload an ansible script to set up a multi-tenet mail config you can run on any linux cloud provider or you can use only of the many that are already around.
Necessity is the plea for every infringement of human freedom. It is the argument of tyrants; it is the creed of slaves.
Now setting up your own email service isn't all that terribly hard.
Provided you're fine with all your outgoing mail ending up in the junk folder. Even with working SPF and DKIM, deliverability isn't certain if anti-spam measures on recipients' mail servers refuse to accept mail from IP addresses issued by a home ISP.
It really doesn't matter what you do for privacy, since all the relay servers in the email chain are harvesting your information anyway.
And then giving the metadata (or meaning) to all the intel services. Which also are hosted at the connection points.
However, if you fully encrypt your email at the source, host your own ISP. We'll still get the info, either from the recipient or other things you aren't aware we use, but it makes us work harder to get it.
Free? Nothing is free.
-- Tigger warning: This post may contain tiggers! --
I've had the same question recently and the answer I got was Proton Mail, based in Switzerland. Fully encrypted end-to-end. I'm surprised someone else hasn't mentioned it by now.
Proton Mail is hosted in Switzerland has end to end encryption with Android and IOS app support and has withstood denial of service attacks from suspected state sponsored hacking.
Just the fact that a state actor tried to take them down is a reason to consider them.
https://www.theverge.com/2015/... https://techcrunch.com/2016/02... https://www.dailydot.com/layer...
You are already going through the pain of changing your address. Make sure you don't have to do it again some time in the future. Mail providers change policies or shut down, sometimes without warning.
Go ahead, and pick a mail provider that you like. But also go out and buy a personal domain. You'll probably be able to find one you like for $10 per year, and you can find DNS providers that will do mail re-direction for free. Have a wildcard redirect set to send any email sent to the domain forwarded to the new mail address. Don't like the way the provider is now doing things? Get a new provider and email address, and change the redirect.
If you want encryption, you really need to just do it yourself. When you do, it doesn't make any difference which provider you use. I would use Gmail simply because they are so huge, the reliability shouldn't be an issue. It works with any standard IMAP client, and since your messages are encrypted, Google can't even scrape them to profile you. Also make sure you are using your own domain name, so that you can easily change providers should you ever wish to.
I'm looking around as well, and what I read about ProtonMail is pretty convincing. They offer free or paid accounts, promise no logging, and they're located in Switzerland.
Enjoy life! This is not a dress rehearsal.
I too had that, and using Thunderbird, I moved all the folders I wanted into other accounts. One thing I forgot - to move my Financial folder into one of the other accounts, and lost everything there. Fortunately, I was able to retrieve the email of my tax preparer, so the damage was not irreversible. But this is what I'd suggest: use Thunderbird to host your yahoo! as well as your other accounts (you do have >1 email account, don't you?), and then move all the emails that are not worth deleting to that one. If you had a policy of putting them in folders, that's even better.
I have something like 7 email accounts for different things. One thing - I always access the emails via Fossamail in Windows or Thunderbird in TrueOS (since Fossamail doesn't have a FreeBSD port the last I checked). That way, I don't get peppered w/ ads or popups. I do have an incredible amount of spam, which was a leading reason that I closed my yahoo account. Gmail, AOL (I have a netscape.net account from the 90s) and Microsoft (both live.com & hotmail) are nowhere near as bad.
I've been with Fastmail since it was in beta in 2001. The company ONLY does email and associated services. This means they are focused on making it work correctly and users having a good features. I would never consider moving.
Follow in the steps of Ms. Secretary Clinton and put together your own private email server!
I did that like 20 years ago when it wasn't as popular.
B'cos years ago, Yahoo! was a pretty respectable company, and had loads of good stuff associated, like geocities and yahoo chat! If I recall right, it was even there ahead of Google, and were a pretty good bet when Netscape was floundering. My first webmail account was Netscape.net (under Netscape 4), then yahoo & hotmail.
Things changed, & went downhill once Google pioneered the concept of monetizing everything on the internet - be it email, web pages and so on. The biggest evidence of that is the way MICROSOFT has changed - from a pure software company (plus some hardware) to a Google wannabe.
Don't be obtuse.
Of course there's no perfect security. You know, if a burglar wants to get into you house badly enough, he'll get in. So why bother locking your door? In fact, just leave your front door open... Oh, change all of your PINs to 1234 and your passwords to "password" while you're at it. After all, if there's no perfect security, why have any security.
The point of TFS is finding a service that is as secure as reasonably possible, while still being useful.
Enjoy life! This is not a dress rehearsal.
Build or rent a server, load it up. Fetchmail can fetch mail from any POP or IMAP provider, if you want to go that route. Or, you can accept mail directly through sendmail, which is not trivial and requires a domain.
If you don't want to lose control of your email address ever again, you can register a domain and either host it yourself, or find a commercial host that will work with customer domains.
Outgoing with sendmail is easy, or your incoming host will usually provide it too, if you prefer that.
Horde works great with activesync devices, or with browsers. It can also manage your calendar, contacts, notes, todo list, etc.
Advanced topics for the DIY crowd: greylisting, spamassassin, DNS-rbls, SPF, SRS
See that "Preview" button?
To add on to this great advice, PAY for G Suite. It's $50/year for the mailbox, completely ad-free, and comes with business support. It doesn't support complete integration like the free gmail account (Play family sharing is a particular pain point), but it's the best anti-spam solution available today and that's worth the money alone. Add to it the benefits of Drive, Photos, Hangouts, etc and it's a fantastic value for the money.
LOAD "SIG",8,1
LOADING...
READY.
RUN
A lot of hosting services provide plenty of space. They come with free email accounts too, so you can set up 'throwaway' emails like donotspamme@yourdomain.com that you can use for services that might spam you.
Shop around for the hosting providers that have what you want. I use fetchmail to pull mine down locally, and pine as my client (yes, for real), but there are plenty of email clients or webmail options on your provider.
Best of all, you can keep your domain and you control it.
My beliefs do not require that you agree with them.
It's available via web and on mobile devices, including iOS 8 if you have an older phone. You get 500 MB storage free, uses two passwords (one for account and one for mailbox), and the providers themselves cannot recover your mailbox passwords. You can tag your emails, make folders, identifies spam, and has an easy way to report bugs/features. They also have a bounty program for hacking with no success and are protected by Swiss privacy laws. It was made by CERN and MIT. The servers are located in a bunker 1000 meters below the Swiss Alps that use end-to-end encryption and 4096-bit SSL certificates. No cloud hosting and they manage their own stuff. https://protonmail.com/securit... The only problem is that it uses Azure. I'm not an M$ at all, but it's either this or Enigmail with Thunderbird and Protonmail is very easy to use and the customer support is awesome whether you're a paying member or not.
I moved everything relevant to the Inbox folder, marked it as unread, and set my pop client to download to my PC. Next step is working on exporting my contacts list.
Why can't we go back to using jumpers to configure slot adapter cards? Why? I say!
Thunderbird was my first stop on this adventure. Thanks for replying. (Can you believe all the people suggesting gmail?)
Why can't we go back to using jumpers to configure slot adapter cards? Why? I say!
I got my own domain name in 1998 and so own my email address. I forward that to a free email provider, and when I'm not happy, I point my email to the next one. I made this switch approx 3 times when my current mail provider was annoying me too much with ads or price hikes. Owning you email address is totally worth it, just imagine all the time you save when you make the switch...
As stated in the post, I'm willing to pay. Just not sure which service to use.
Why can't we go back to using jumpers to configure slot adapter cards? Why? I say!
Where Google basically mines your data en masse and gives it out to US government agencies, Proton Mail is in Switzerland and is not subject to involuntary data request from USA government requests. (Of course they could do it voluntarily but it would really hurt their rep if word got out) https://protonmail.com/
"Imagination is more important than knowledge" - Einstein
The Terms of Service are actually pretty strict, and Google has extremely good data center security hygiene. The ToS on gmail are much more lax, even though it's the same software.
Fresh from Russia: https://mail.yandex.com/
"Imagination is more important than knowledge" - Einstein
Duh... if you want control over the privacy of your mailbox, you have to host it yourself. You can do that at home with some ISPs (give them a call if they actively block port 25, some will simply unblock it), most VPS and many other hosting systems, you can get a good host for a few bucks a month and it's "free" if you already have one for business or other purposes or if you have a business or someone with business-grade ISP's you can also host systems (perhaps offer a trade)
You can pick a host in far-away-istan or closer to home depending on your government, I myself have dedicated servers hosted in the US (for latency reasons) but hosted by a non-US company with encrypted file systems that are backed up to a disk at another site. I'm not sure if the hosting company at Sealand still exists, if you're really worried about government checking up on you there are various offshore hosting companies but then you wouldn't be using e-mail in the first place although offshore hosting is typically ~$1-200/month even for the simplest servers.
Custom electronics and digital signage for your business: www.evcircuits.com
is there a reason that you don't just have your own mailserver? you have three options:
option 1: buy/pay for a hosted/managed/co-lo/virtual/private-cloud webserver somewhere. you can pay between $5 and $500 per month, and install whatever you choose.
option 2: buy/pay for an account with someone who's already done option 1 above. you can pay between $2/mailbox and $100 per month. I would charge you $25/month for many mailboxes. You can manage them however you choose.
option 3: buy a domain name, and point it to you static or dynamic home ip address. run your own mailserver at home. it'll cost you nothing beyond the domain & dns level of probably $25 per year. presuming your connection is reasonable -- and e-mail compensates for occasional fluctuations anyway -- you'll have everything under your own roof.
In all three cases, you have 100% privacy. Options 1 & 3 let you have whatever features you can imagine. And no matter what you'll have far more control than you've ever had before.
Personally, in your position, I'd go the game clan method. Get three buddies, pool your pennies, choose option 1 above, spend $50-$100/month on a virtually-dedicated/private-cloud server that starts off with some reasonable package of carp already setup for you, and take it from there. My neighbour offers such packages at every price range imaginable.
Love your signature. You obviously had a super fast floppy disk drive... I never managed to get my hands on one of those! :)
I wonder how many here understand it :)
Proton Mail
If all you care about is convenience and price, gmail is the best bet.
However, gmail has a few weak points:
- Governments and corporations assume you are using it, if you become a target, first thing they do is sue or force google to give them a copy of all your email. You may not find out about it until after the fact. Basically, using gmail/google means you are OK with the surveillance state being able to grab all the details about your digital life whenever it wants.
- Hackers assume that getting access to email is the best path in social networking and they have put together an extensive trick list focusing on gmail since everyone uses it. And, if they gain access, are you sure you would know about it or even if google found out about it, that they would tell you? It's in google's interest that everyone forget about the security of their cloud data.
- Gmail gets coordinated with all the other info that google knows about you and google sells info about you to their customers or targets ads for you on behalf of customers. Frankly, even without email, I think google knows enough already.
- Gmail imap is _wierd_ and google will probably shut it down in favor of some google only protocol if they ever can.
- Google is no longer a _good_ company, as it has become bigger, it has started to act more like a Monopoly and that combined with its ownership of android is pushing us more towards a closed internet. I honestly don't want to support Google's growth anymore.
Another option is office 365:
- Microsoft has its issues, but it realizes it really needs to compete in the cloud space.
- Microsoft email integrates well if you have a mobile hardware device like a Surface Pro/Surface Book.
- Exchange sync for contacts/calendar/groupware is hard to compete with.
That said, MS has its own security issues....so the best solution is likely hosting your own email....and for those who don't have the time to be constantly updating, find a good mail software suite that does get updated automatically and which has a good security history. Zimbra might be a good example - there are many others.
Try to find a free service that doesn't require a cell phone.
“He’s not deformed, he’s just drunk!”
I believe that Y! is the only free email service provider that won't let you bulk-save your email messages. So, I've all but left Yahoo; however How do I get my (old) messages out?
(Before the 'let it go' people come, I need the messages for legal purposes).
I was able to get *some* of the messages to Gmail; however, I would like to get all of them.
Suggestions?
You're either japanese or just time traveled from 2002, because nobody except Japanese and certain out of touch 'nix users living in the past use archaic sylpheed when claws-mail, a superior fork is around.
Open source Claws-mail doesn't just have a "fairly current" windows build, it IS current. As well as builds for NetBSD AND FreeBSD.
I have AT&T as an ISP, and a few years ago they farmed out their mail to Yahoo. I run my own inbound, but for at least a decade, I have dealt with the outbound port 25 block (even before it got blocked) by forwarding outbound mail through my ISP. When it was just AT&T, they could identify "friendly" mail by being in one of their IP blocks. Now you have to use your account's e-mail/password combo.
The problem is that by default it only accepts mail with a From: address equal to that specific e-mail address. Any others you want (I typically use one user name with two different domains, one or two other household members), have to be specifically added with the Yahoo Mail user interface.
I guess I may just end up having to ask for outbound 25 to be opened up, and re-configure my server to send outbound mail directly. The negative side is that will cause my mail to come from a customer address (anti-spammers are likely to flag the IPs as "dynamic", even though it's in a static block), so I may have to get a hosted server for an outbound relay.
Or I could even get lucky, and AT&T might realize the situation they are now in (e-mail service outsourced to one of their telco competitors) and in-source it again.
#naabhaprzrag, #sverubfr-000, #agi-fcbafberq, negvpyr[pynff*=' negvpyr-ary-'] { qvfcynl: abar !vzcbegnag; }
You have given me much food for thought. Perhaps to follow will be a detailed description of my preferred solution.
Why can't we go back to using jumpers to configure slot adapter cards? Why? I say!
What took you this long? It's 2017 not 1997.
This is probably not very relevant, but in Finland we have this thing called http://iki.fi/ that provides permanent redirect addresses for web and email. They charge a one-time signup fee around 30 EUR for life. It's only for Finnish residents, though. The closest international equivalent I can think of is http://sdf.org/ -- I also paid a similar one-time fee for a somewhat expanded account.
Escher was the first MC and Giger invented the HR department.
If the browser uploads something, and you can't find out what's uploaded, then that's a severe security issue more serious than auto-executing javascript.
If you can find out what's uploaded simply by pressing F12 and viewing the networkt tab, then there's nothing to worry about. In case of Yahoo mail, it's probably saving the draft.
You obviously had a super fast floppy disk drive...
The 1541 super fast? Ha ha ha ha
I never managed to get my hands on one of those! :)
UK? They were considered de-rigeur in the states.
I wonder how many here understand it :)
Probably most of Slashdot.
As far as I can tell it is encrypted with just a passphrase and not to a key?
It's Slashdot. If they have the source, build the damned thing themselves. Sheesh...
"So long and thanks for all the fish."
However, the major email providers all keep the server stuff in clear text. So unless you use end-to-end encryption like PGP
This is my point. The TLAs don't need to crack SSL/TLS. They just get a copy from your ISP. My ISP only moves encrypted blobs for me. So I don't care if they've cracked the link or have free access to the server disk farm.
Have gnu, will travel.
If you successfully move all your emails to the newer account using Thunderbird, it won't be that difficult to retrieve the contacts. Aside from gmail, one more thing I might suggest - outlook.com. In which case, in Windows, you can use that account to log in, and the People app will automatically mine your contacts for you. If you then use either Thunderbird or Windows Mail, you won't have to see their ads.
Wow, so you're pretty much a dick, huh..
If you have no biases against a Russian company, I highly recommend Yandex Mail For Domain where you can use your own domain name free of charge. Personally I use it as my main e-mail account. Or you may use their regular Yandex.Mail if you don't have your own domain name.
Although I run my own primary email, I chose to pay for Fastmail as my secondary/backup/place where I get emails for my primary services sent so that way I can recover them when they go down.
If you're looking for a high-quality, run by people who give a damn, and (in my opinion) trustworthy service then Fastmail is the way to go. It's not the cheapest and doesn't have massive limits though.
A couple more: countermail.com, neomailbox.com
Also, ThatOnePrivacyGuy (who mostly does VPN reviews) has a section on his website for email services. I like his reviews, he seems to have a good approach to all of this.
If you don't mind paying $3/month, I highly recommend KolabNow. They offer both webmail and IMAP access, the software they develop is open source, the company's privacy policy is great, and they're hosted in Switzerland which also has sane laws regarding privacy. The few times there's been issues (DDoS attacks, Heartbleed bug) they've been upfront about it and sent out a mail immediately explaining the situation and what they're doing to address it. I've used them for four years now, and I'm quite satisfied.
Why assume malice? I assumed the person WASN'T being sarcastic because if he was he should have emphasized it a bit more.
Besides that, 1541 ownership WAS very low in the UK most UK C64 owners got their games on tapes which was not the case in the US.
And while the 1541 is faster than a tape drive, it was slower than Apple and Atari drives.
I've had Yahoo Mail since before '02, and I'm not sure I'm going to give it up now. I could put it on my own server, but I just haven't committed to that yet. I absolutely hate the UI on Gmail, even though I maintain three accounts there for various purposes. I think I'm just going to wait and see what Verizon does. Maybe they'll give me a price break on my cell bill (yeah, and monkeys might fly out of my butt).
When you sympathize with stupidity, you start thinking like an idiot.
C64 FTW
Why can't we go back to using jumpers to configure slot adapter cards? Why? I say!
I guess the NSA doesn't need their own webmail because they pretty much have open access to all the big American webmail companies. For some reason I have the idea that Gmail in particular is like home base for the NSA.
If you have a gmail account you basically have to assume that everything you write there will be permanently stored and searchable in an the NSA text database. I guess some people are cool with that though. A lot of people don't care. It doesn't really bother me that much either, but it's not like there isn't a choice. So I go with offshore webmail instead.
Quite an experience to live in fear, isn't it? That's what it is to be a slave.
Gmail has automatic spam-blocking built-in. Whoever posted that they don't is probably some fBook flunkie.
Because everything thats free comes with a catch .. except free beer.
My yahoo.com address has been around a while. It's the one I used for many newsletters and web-based services over the years. A large portion of my e-mail comes to me via that address, forwarded automatically to my ISP address.
So when e-mail forwarding failed, without warning, it had consequences. It took over a day for me to notice it and to take corrective action: turn it on when it was already on, and then verify I wanted it on.
A chunk of that time was spent finding current information about how to check the status of forwarding (it was on) and how to turn it on (which I did, anyway). Once I opened the e-mail to verify activation, it worked as though nothing had happened.
Except that a bunch of e-mails which didn't get forwarded before still didn't forward.
Understandable, and desirable, when turning on automatic forwarding that had not been on. You likely wouldn't want all the e-mail in your inbox, no matter how old, to get forwarded to that address -- just the new e-mail that arrived after automatic forwarding was turned on.
Still, a pain in the ass. No response from service@yahoo.com. But it's been zero business days since I notified them (Friday evening), so maybe it's too early to be disappointed with them.
Tomorrow evening is not.
There's no time like the present. Well, the past used to be.
At the moment, I have 8 email accounts on 5 different systems. Like others, I use gmail predominantly and gmail provides by far the best user experience and performance. I do have a Yahoo account that I cannot close right away unfortunately, but I have to find a way to wind it down. Yahoo mail has always had a terrible user experience and is excessively crash prone and a CPU hog on the desktop to the point that I no longer use it on the desktop, I do use the Android Yahoo mail app that seems a little more robust but nowhere at the level of the gmail app. I have given up on independent (like Thunderbird) POP3 (too inconvenient) or IMAP mail clients because of poor or absent synchronization between devices. Put your pride carefully in your pocket as you might need it later, and use gmail.