Email service of preference

What is your favourite / preferred email service?


  • Total voters
    35
I use my ISP server for personal email. Business domain server for CBI Web.

Not a fan of web based email. I never liked the thought of my mail being on someone else's server, therefore out of my control; no matter how secure, and no matter if they back it up every 2 minutes. I like my mail coming to me, where I know it is, and it gets backed up nightly onto an external drive.

That being said, I do have Gmail, Yahoo and Hotmail accounts for various purposes as Google Analytics and such, a few spam catchers, and a couple for anonymous posting on the Web. ;) If I had to choose one web account, it would probably be Gmail. Yahoo second.
 
I use my ISP server for personal email. Business domain server for CBI Web.

Not a fan of web based email. I never liked the thought of my mail being on someone else's server, therefore out of my control; no matter how secure, and no matter if they back it up every 2 minutes. I like my mail coming to me, where I know it is, and it gets backed up nightly onto an external drive.
Makes sense, I would say. :)
 
I use my own linux based email system (postfix+dovecot+pigeonhole+spamassassin) and access it via IMAP (Thunderbird + K-9 on Android) and Roundcube.

So much more flexible than free mail services, and I can't think of a single thing they can do that I can't.
 
If you have the knowledge and resources to set up your own mail server, then it is of course by far the most flexible solution. If you know what you're doing, it will also be the most reliable and trustworthy solution, but this requires quite some knowledge.

Also, I wouldn't use GMail (or any other public mail service for that matter) for important business mail. Basically, not having everything under my own control always leaves me with a bad feeling - there are too many examples why it can be a very bad idea to rely on someone else's services. I would also want to add that my trust into Google is not without limits :)

So, for the record, I voted GMail which I mainly use as my personal email service for less important things. Should my gmail account become compromised or otherwise inaccessible, it would be annoying but not a disaster.
 
I used Juno for quite a while and then switched to excite. Initially, excite was a free internet service. Their model was supposed to make revenue from advertising. That didn't work out and I continued to use their email. Several years ago, they mucked up their user interface and added a LOT of advertising. I switched to gmail. Gmail works very well. I don't get a lot of spam or any advertising. As someone else mentioned, the search and filtering functions work very well.

Jeff
 
Quite a few people running their own email exchange servers, I see. :)

I'm not sure and I can actually be absolutely wrong about this...I can understand people not wanting to have their emails on someone else's server, but even with your own personal email server, does your email drop directly at your server? I mean, I thought that the very nature of email was that it is routed through atleast a couple of servers (ISP etc) before it lands into your inbox?
 
I'm not sure and I can actually be absolutely wrong about this...I can understand people not wanting to have their emails on someone else's server, but even with your own personal email server, does your email drop directly at your server? I mean, I thought that the very nature of email was that it is routed through atleast a couple of servers (ISP etc) before it lands into your inbox?
Like any other IP traffic, emails are routed of course. However the SMTP protocol is "point to point", so emails are directly delivered to the MX (or backup MX if the primary happens to be unavailable) of the target domain.

It all depends on how your server is configured and how your domain's DNS zone holds MX records - all mails for a given domain are directly delivered to the primary MX listed for that domain and if the DNS lists a backup MX (which it should), the backup will receive mails and forward them to the primary when it becomes available again.

Of course it's possible to "sniff" email traffic and intercept emails at the network level without the knowledge of the sender or receiver. If you are concerned about this, a strong encryption method (gpg or s/mime) is what you want to use and the only way to prevent others from reading your mail.
 
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