Neta said:
Everything you say makes sense. I have a particular need to do this
so that
flyers for a service I provide will be correct over a period of time
during
which I'll have to change servers due to my move. Eventually that
becomes a
non-problem, at which time I would drop pobox.com.
Can you suggest a provider that isn't my internet provider? I'm
just
starting to try to figure this out.
Neta
I figure if you're willing to pay $20 per year just for an e-mail
*forwarding* service then maybe you'd be willing to pay $24 per year
to get a webhosted account which gives you web site space along with
usually several e-mail accounts, like at 1and1.com. However, I like
cheap as long as it is reliable, so I dumped using my own ISP's e-mail
accounts (spam filtering sucks and no server-side rules to pre-filter
out unwanted e-mails), left Hotmail years ago, and have been with
Yahoo Mail. That doesn't mean Yahoo Mail doesn't have occasional
problems. I have a freebie Yahoo Mail account and use YahooPOPs to
yank my e-mails from there. However, like many free e-mail accounts,
sending through them often appends a spam signature to your outbound
e-mails promoting their paid service. To get around their spam
signature, I use my ISP's SMTP server for outbound e-mails. So I'm
receiving at Yahoo and sending at my ISP (Comcast) but still showing a
Yahoo e-mail address to my recipients. By using YahooPOPs, the
freebie webmail account looks like a POP3 account and I can insert
SpamPal between my e-mail client and YahooPOPs to further enhance or
improve spam filter control.
Inbound: e-mail client <-- SpamPal <-- YahooPOPs <-- Yahoo
Outbound: e-mail client --> ISP's SMTP server
I've found Yahoo to have a better spam filter than my own ISP. My own
ISP doesn't let me define any server-side rules but Yahoo does.
Server-side rules and filtering is preferred to client-side filtering
so you don't waste time for the bandwidth to download the mails that
you won't want anyway and the disk space to hold them until you delete
them.
If you don't want to figure out how to use YahooPOPs to get at mails
in a freebie Yahoo mail account, you could get a paid Yahoo Mail
account which gives you access to their POP server (and their SMTP
server which then does not add their spam signature). There are other
free POP/SMTP providers but they are dwindling, usually have low
quotas, and might add spam crap to your outbound mails, and may even
spam you because you now have a business relationship with them which
circumvents the CAN-SPAM act.
When I had dial-up, I was changing about every 6 months to find a
better and cheaper provider. Each change mandated a change in my
e-mail address. When I went to cable, I thought I'd have that
indefinitely but it turns out that when I move and although I'm the
same person opening the next new account that I rarely could take my
e-mail address with me. I tried Gmail for awhile because you can use
their *emulated* POP3 service (it is not true POP3 and I have run
afoul of their message store handling when monitoring for e-mails that
use the TOP command which make the mails disappear from their queue
when my e-mail client later uses RETR to get the message). For many
users and for a simple setup, Gmail's POP service is okay. However,
like Hotmail, Yahoo, and many other freebie providers, sending
outbound e-mails through Gmail will result in a spam signature getting
appended to your messages (so, again, I used Gmail's emulated POP
service for inbound mails but used my ISP's SMTP server for outbound
mails). There are problems with their service that they haven't
addressed in over 2 years and it's been in "beta" state even longer (I
don't think it will ever be non-beta until they scrap it with a
replacement service or drop it altogether or pawn it off, er, sell it
to someone else). Gmail has server-side filters but they really suck
because they are so weak and primitive as to be nearly worthless.
To prevent getting spammed, never divulge your true e-mail address to
any unknown or untrusted recipients. Instead give them an alias. I
use Sneakemail.com because they are not just a forwarding service. If
you reply to mails that come through their Sneakemail alias, the
headers in your reply are stripped out and they insert theirs so your
outbound mails through them look like they originated from them (and
you don't need to insert any local proxies since the reply will go
back to them for them to reroute). If you give each untrusted
recipient a unique alias and then you get spammed through that alias,
you will know exactly who violated you. You can also disable or
discard alias at-will without any effect to your true e-mail account.
Don't try to spam through them since they are very anti-spam and a
single complaint will kill your account. I use their freebie service
which has quotas that are lower but they are well within my volume for
my e-mails (that use their alias accounts).
