Urgent - please recommend me a new Email supplier, Freeserve is closing down.

[Ambient Sheep]

Hi all,

On the 31st May, in just 12 days' time, the Freeserve email address that I've had for 17 years, through which I do all my "real-life" activity such as banking, bills, shopping etc., is being closed by its current owner Orange/EE.

Their recommendation is for me to get a GMail account and use its Import facility to take all my emails over to there.

However, I don't really wish to use GMail for a number of reasons, including the facts that I hate the interface and that I already have a couple of other GMail accounts that I use for social media, and (a) I'm not sure how they feel about people actually doing that, (b) I don't really want them to link that all up with my real-life identity (even though they probably do anyway by a myriad of other methods).  I'd rather use another supplier.

Also, one super-cool feature that Freeserve mail had, which is one reason I've persisted with it despite having a pretty clunky webmail interface, was that you owned the whole domain, and could put ANYTHING before the @ sign.  So I would give every entity a separate email address, e.g.

barclays@<myrealname>.freeserve.co.uk
britishgas@<myrealname>.freeserve.co.uk
facebook@<myrealname>.freeserve.co.uk
firstdirect@<myrealname>.freeserve.co.uk
popbitch@<myrealname>.freeserve.co.uk
southern-electric@<myrealname>.freeserve.co.uk
etc.
etc.

I would like to keep this feature if at all possible.

I currently have about 530MB of emails on their server (so I can't exactly blame them for closing it down, hehe), although the ironic thing is that I never intended to use it as webmail.  I always used to POP3 it down into Outlook Express, but then for some reason about seven or eight years ago that stopped working reliably - it would download some mails but not others - and once I found that there was actually a webmail interface to check out what was still on the server, I just started using that instead, and have done ever since.

Anyway, I accept that I will have to pay for this.  Does anybody have any recommendations for a company I can use, or am I just going to have to suck it up and use Gmail after all?  Especially if I end up having an issue with trying to get the emails off of their server onto my new one...

This is causing me a major panic, especially as I've left it so late (they gave a bit under three months' notice, but I've had a whole bunch of other real-life issues to deal with lately), so any help/suggestions/recommendations would be very gratefully accepted.

Cheers,
Sheepy.

[Twed]

I like fastmail.com

Reliable, flexible. It's a paid service but one year's service is the cost of a pizza, or something.

[Gurke and Hare]

If you want to keep the ability to create arbitrary email addresses, you could register a domain like ambientsheep.org.uk and use that. It doesn't cost a lot, and I think most registrars will then host it for you for nothing, enabling you to set up an address that email sent to anything @ambientsheep.org.uk will be forwarded to. You'd still have to set something else up, but doing this will allow you to keep this feature.

[greencalx]

I was going to suggest that. I use 123-reg for all my domain management needs, though other registrars are available. They do email forwarding for free, and I think you can purchase a mailbox from them too.

[Sebastian Cobb]

If you want to keep the ability to create arbitrary email addresses, you could register a domain like ambientsheep.org.uk and use that. It doesn't cost a lot, and I think most registrars will then host it for you for nothing, enabling you to set up an address that email sent to anything @ambientsheep.org.uk will be forwarded to. You'd still have to set something else up, but doing this will allow you to keep this feature.

I know he said he didn't want to use gmail, but you can tie personal domains to that. i personally like their UI and it bakes in all their spam/phish filtration, which on a personal domain can be a mammoth task to keep on top of.

As well as that a standard @gmail.com address has the notion of 'siblings' which works in a very similar way:

http://www.thewindowsclub.com/gmail-address-tricks

1. Use (+) to create unlimited siblings of your Gmail address
Yes, that's possible. Just append a plus ("+") sign after your email address and after that, you can insert any combination of words or numbers to create any number of personalized email IDs with the same inbox.

For instance, if your current email ID is windowsclub@gmail.com, you can modify email to windowsclub+authors@gmail.com or windowsclub+contactme@gmail.com or use any combination to still receive an email with the same ID, windowsclub@gmail.com.

Hence using this Gmail trick, you will be able to create multiple aliases of your primary ID and that too without tweaking any setting or configuration.

Tips:

You can make use of multiple aliases to sign up with web services with their name after the ("+") sign. So, when you get an email from them on your primary ID you will know instantly which service has sent you the email.
You can use an alias name to sign up for social channels and use their name while registering. For instance, thewindowsclub@gmail.com can be modified into thewindowsclub+facebook@gmail.com, thewindowsclub+twitter@gmail.com, and so on.

[NoSleep]

It's crap when services you've relied on for so long come to an end, but I'm getting used to this happening on the net nowadays.

I've ended up reluctantly using gmail.com purely because it was free and it offered POP3 and IMAP so that I can use it via a mail client on my computer quite simply. It isn't so bad using gmail via POP3 as you aren't obliged to sign into your account via the browser and therefore you're not inundated with other gumph you can never be arsed with.

However Amby's enquiry sent me on a search for what free email services are available and found this:

https://www.lifewire.com/top-free-email-services-1171481

...which currently rates Zoho Mail as the top free service. And that includes POP3 and IMAP, too. I wonder what they're like on privacy and leaving you be (compared to gmail.com)?

EDIT: Looks like it might be able to do something like you required, Amby.

[Zetetic]

Regarding sub-addressing (or 'tag-addressing' or 'plus-addressing' or 'siblings' as Sebastian Cobb's post has it) - be aware that a sufficiently large number of developers are useless shitheaps who don't know how validate an email address correctly (and so will refuse email addresses with '+' in the local part) so that you won't be able to use it reliably.

(The best examples of this I've come across are where a registration form does allow a '+' but other bits of their application are confused by it.)

Also you're obviously giving up your actual main email address in a very obvious way; it's not a proper replacement for a 'wildcard'-type address.

[NoSleep]

Had a quick look at Zoho and one of its services includes incorporation into your google account, so maybe not one to go for after all.

Here's another list of free email services that might offer a little privacy alongside some other features (although I see they're endorsing Zoho):

http://thesimplecomputer.info/free-webmail-for-better-privacy

[Ambient Sheep]

Thank you all for your suggestions, I shall look into them.  Keep 'em coming if you can.

That gmail address thing is indeed cool, but yeah I can imagine a LOT of web services barfing on the "+" sign, and as has been pointed out, it reveals your "base" address pretty obviously.  Nice to know about though, thank you!


One other important feature I'd really like that I forgot to mention in my OP: Folders!  At the moment I am able to toss the incoming mail into separate folders (just like you can do in Outlook Express if you POP it down, or indeed on the webpage on Hotmail).  I've never really managed to get this working nicely on GMail; instead you have that annoying label thing that I've never managed to properly understand - perhaps that's my issue, I dunno.

But with 43 separate folders (roughly speaking two for each category, or in some verbose cases for each supplier -- one for the proper emails and one from the semi-spam from them, e.g. water bills v. spam-for-water-pipe-insurance), I either need to get a handle on the whole label thing, or not use GMail.

(Btw, the reason I don't want to use Hotmail, seeing as I mentioned it, is because since their last website redesign it's now too slow and bloated to run reasonably on any machine I own.  So yes, free email that requires a recent machine to render the webpage is no good either...)


Given how late I've left this, I suspect I'm going to be left with no option in the short-term but to switch to GMail, at least to try to get all of my old email sucked over, given that that in itself may well be a majorly fraught process.  But then I think it'll be time to switch over to something else more permanent (perhaps immediately for new mail), which for once I won't mind paying for.  So yes, more suggestions still welcome.  Although I'm not sure I have enough days left to be registering a domain and trying to get that to work in time...

To be honest, in a way Freeserve/Orange/Wanadoo/EE have been good to me: they've given me free email for the last 17 years and I'm now using over half of their 1GB space (although was only 100MB originally, they chose to gradually increase it).  I've kinda been expecting them to start charging for it for years, but sadly that's not an option they've decided to follow, because I would have happily paid them rather than facing this nightmare (I expect to be spending the next week changing my email address on about 20-30 different websites, that's if I even can in some cases!).  What I didn't know until now is that this has clearly been in the pipeline for around five years, as they've now mentioned that they've not given out any new email addresses since 2012.  Wish I'd known that, I might have prepared myself for this a lot earlier...

[Dex Sawash]

I have a mail.com address I use as a burner.
No idea if it is good/bad/something.

[Sebastian Cobb]

Regarding sub-addressing (or 'tag-addressing' or 'plus-addressing' or 'siblings' as Sebastian Cobb's post has it) - be aware that a sufficiently large number of developers are useless shitheaps who don't know how validate an email address correctly (and so will refuse email addresses with '+' in the local part) so that you won't be able to use it reliably.

(The best examples of this I've come across are where a registration form does allow a '+' but other bits of their application are confused by it.)

Also you're obviously giving up your actual main email address in a very obvious way; it's not a proper replacement for a 'wildcard'-type address.

I'm a lazy fucker so my regex's would probably be .* up until the @.

Since switching to a password manager my new favorite thing are websites that truncate passwords at the first sign of an alphanumeric character, even better are the ones that seemingly only do it on the way in so it never matches.

To add to this, if I was changing addresses I'd probably go for something secure, whatever's the new lavabit really.

[canadagoose]

Bear in mind, if you don't like Gmail, you can always switch again - although it might not be the most convenient option...

Personally, I've used Gmail as my main email service for 10 years, so I'm really used to it and would find it hard to switch. I've used Outlook.com and Yahoo Mail for secondary email accounts at various points, but I've never found them as comfortable for some reason. I've used Zoho Mail with my own domains in the past, too, and it's pretty good and has two-factor authentication, should you want to keep your account a bit more secure. If you want to keep the ability to have several email addresses under your own (sub)domain, Zoho might be the option for you - but I've never used aliases with it myself.

[Ambient Sheep]

And of course, the other reason I'm now realising that I don't want to use GMail is that I'll have to endlessly log out of my "social" account and back into my "official" account and back again.  A right pain in the arse...

[QDRPHNC]

What I do at work is keep my work Gmail open in Chrome, then use an incognito window for my personal gmail, etc.  Means I only have to log in once a day, and if I open a new incognito tab for YouTube or whatever, in already logged in.

[Sebastian Cobb]

And of course, the other reason I'm now realising that I don't want to use GMail is that I'll have to endlessly log out of my "social" account and back into my "official" account and back again.  A right pain in the arse...

Google supports multiple sign in if you enable it:


Alternatively just use a different browser (or browser profile) for one of them.

[NoSleep]

Or use a mail client? You don't have to sign in to all of Google's bollocks then.

[Sebastian Cobb]

Or use a mail client? You don't have to sign in to all of Google's bollocks then.

That seems like more of a faff these days.

[NoSleep]

Your mail client handles POP3, then sorted.

[Ambient Sheep]

What I do at work is keep my work Gmail open in Chrome, then use an incognito window for my personal gmail, etc.  Means I only have to log in once a day, and if I open a new incognito tab for YouTube or whatever, in already logged in.

Ahhhh yes, I'd forgotten that trick.  I used to do that, years ago, but had completely forgotten.  Thank you!

Google supports multiple sign in if you enable it:

And thank you too... I shall have to try to find out how to do that (will Google it, ironically, if I can't).  Although having said that, I did have a poke round the menus a while back to see if I could see an option but couldn't see anything obvious.  On one machine I had for a while a few years back it did it of its own accord without any fuss, but when they then upgraded Gmail the function seemed to disappear and I've never managed to get it back.

As someone who spent much of his working life as a (if I may say so) top-notch C and assembler programmer, my failure to work these things out for myself these days can be very depressing. :-(  Thanks again for your help.

[Hollow]

lol...freeserve...I used to work for them.