Independant email providers?

Ok, deliberately ignoring local & national ISPs as well as live/hotmail, gmail, ymail/yahoo, etc.......

What email providers are people using?

I'm looking for a provider with

pop3/imap/smtp & web access
ssl & optional encryption
short, sweet, no-nonsense privacy policy

recommendations and thanks!

 

Depends. I pay for web hosting and I get email along with it. If you consider getting your own domain, Dreamhost does all of that.

 

Yah, I had considered just grabbing some web space and using the included mail services, but I don't want to be 'worried' about properly configuring or maintaining a blank web server just for the sake of email.

 

you dont need to maintain a web server.....

the cheap options almost always just give you some webspace. So it is stored on a shared server and you only get a very small part for your page.

There are also many companies that do email hosting. but these are mostly targeted at SME.

 

If you plan to keep your email after leaving that hosting provider, use regular email providers. Gmail has option for paid email boxes that you can use with your website domain.

 

What is your reason for not using Gmail?

By the way, you don't have to pay to use Gmail with your own domain. So that your email appears as [email protected] instead of [email protected]. You can do this for free simply by signing up for google apps. I've done this, works great. One great thing is you can create an administrator account for, uh administrating all your user accounts. So if one of the users forgets the password, and can't use the password recovery, or just has their gmail account hijacked by someone, the domain administer can reset their password.

The paid edition of google apps is called google apps premier. It costs $50 per user per year. It offers several features I won't get into here, you can look it up.

One piece of advice though. If you register with google apps, the free or the premier edition, you can purchase your domain through google. They use enom and godaddy domain registers. I have read an article though that said it is better not to purchase the domain through google, and you should instead first purchase the damain, though godaddy or enom, and then sign up for google apps. The reason in the article for doing this is so you are not dependent on google to pay your domain registration fees and if you ever want to leave gmail you maintain control of your domain yourself. Here's the article:
http://tech.kateva.org/2009/03/transferring-google-apps-enom-domain.html

I registered my domain through google. But if I were doing it now I would first register the domain through godaddy or enom.

Note: I'm not an expert on this stuff. Just passing along what I've learned so far.

 

I will place no data into Googles hands.

"Do no Evil" has morphed into "Do no Evil to the revenue stream".

Much the same problem MSFT and Y have.

But I'm not here to debate corporate ethics, my requirements are what they are.