Email address

[melonfool]

Hi

My most used email is failing badly. It is hosted by Claranet, and it's not free. I've had a couple of people say they get an error message so I got a mate to test it from a number of different email accounts (4, I think) and I didn't get any of them and he got the error message or similar each time. He also could not reply to (but did receive) emails I sent him. I *think* the error is linked to Office365, but whatever it is, it's definitely my end of the email chain that is causing it. Who knows what emails I could have been missing!

I've also had issues with Claranet with 'bulk' email, for example they don't let through emails from Nationwide. I get a letter every month from Nationwide telling me my email address doesn't work. But Santander have no issue. And I get a TON of spam. It's got far worse this year but I get about 30 spam messages a day now, their filter isn't stopping this at all, and nothing goes into the filter on the webmail page anyway.

No point contacting them, they could not have been less interested in the issue with Nationwide and told me to tell Nationwide to use a different email address.

Anyway - I need to bite the bullet and change my email address. I wonder if anyone has any recommendations. The criteria is pretty simple:

- not hotmail or gmail (already have both, hate them) and must be able to be used in Outlook (i.e. downloadable by POP/IMAP/whatever it is).
- not an app.
- it doesn't need to be free.

The alternative is that I buy a domain. I already have one for my business (but this email issue is my personal account which I do want to keep separate) and it's very easy to manage. Does anyone have any ideas about that? I see melonfool.co.uk is available

Thanks for any ideas

Mel

[Midsmartin]

I would normally suggest Gmail as excellent, though it has a couple of quirks. Good spam filtering.

Outlook.com offers free mail (the service that used to be Hotmail) but it's moved on a bit since Hotmail days.

Buying your own domain doesn't give you an email provider.. You still need to set it up with an email service (generally speaking). Office365, now called Microsoft365 is the commercial version of outlook.com. You can use your own domain with that at a price that starts at £3 a month ("exchange online" gives you a mailbox but nothing else).

If you want to use Outlook on your PC, then outlook.com or ms365 should work most smoothly.

[Mike4]

I would normally suggest Gmail as excellent, though it has a couple of quirks. Good spam filtering.

Me too, specifically for the truly excellent and accurate spam filter.

Mine is configured to work with my domain names and for me, works really well. I can see why some people don't like gmail but for the spam filtering, it's worth putting up with in my experience.

Its a shame Claranet are going down the tubes. They are one of the oldest service providers I can think of, along with Compuserve, back in the day when a 14.4kbit/sec modem was considered fast. I used them myself for a few years.

[Breelander]

- not hotmail or gmail (already have both, hate them) and must be able to be used in Outlook (i.e. downloadable by POP/IMAP/whatever it is).
- not an app.
- it doesn't need to be free.

I happily use Yahoo Mail. It's free, or there is a Pro version available on subscription.

Use the IMAP settings below to download your email from Yahoo Mail into a third-party email app, like Thunderbird, Outlook, or Mac Mail.

https://help.yahoo.com/kb/download-emai ... 28681.html

[melonfool]

Thank you all.

No, I really hate both Gmail and Hotmail (outlook.com as it now is). I already have both.

I don't want Office365, sorry, should have said that - I really dislike it. I object to subscription models. I do have Office so I already have Outlook.

The Office365 issue with Clara is people who email me all seem to be using it. I do not use it and I have no problem emailing myself from any of my other emails, including work (which doesn't use Office 365).

I had forgotten that I have a Yahoo account, though I doubt I'd have the details anywhere, so I will look into that. Thanks!

Re the domain, yes, I'd buy/rent the domain then set it up with the provider to have email. I've done this for my business and it costs about £20 a year I think.

Mel

[melonfool]

Oh, I should add, I get almost no spam in my company email on my own domain.

Tons in Hotmail. Not really checked Gmail, I loathe it so much I literally never look at it.

Mel

[Redmires]

Another long time yahoo user here. I have several addresses which I access via Thunderbird. I never see any spam in the inboxes, but the odd one in the junk/bulk folder.

[sloth]

I use Protonmail, the free version, and there are paid premium versions with extra features. No problems so far.

[UncleEbenezer]

If your biz domain works as you would wish, why not simply use the same service for melonfool.co.uk? That way your additional cost is limited to the cost of the domain, unless you use a service that opportunistically charges double!

I agree about gmail. Its usefulness ceased when it reached the point of overzealously filtering non-spam, yet accepting the messages so a sender has no clue the gmail user hasn't received it.

[AF62]

- not hotmail or gmail (already have both, hate them) and must be able to be used in Outlook (i.e. downloadable by POP/IMAP/whatever it is).

You hate Gmail when used with Outlook - What is there to dislike?

[melonfool]

- not hotmail or gmail (already have both, hate them) and must be able to be used in Outlook (i.e. downloadable by POP/IMAP/whatever it is).

You hate Gmail when used with Outlook - What is there to dislike?

I was given to believe it could not be configured to work with Outlook. Do you have a link for how to do it?

I also don't like my gmail address, my ex set it up and it has my first name, the first two letters of my surname and my year of birth. Really stupid. I can set up another one if necessary though.

I looked at Proton mail in fact, good to know it can be used with Outlook. It gets good reviews.

Yes, no reason not to buy a domain via the same service as my current business domain, I don't know if they have a dodgy charging structure. I'll check.

Mel

[AF62]

- not hotmail or gmail (already have both, hate them) and must be able to be used in Outlook (i.e. downloadable by POP/IMAP/whatever it is).

You hate Gmail when used with Outlook - What is there to dislike?

I was given to believe it could not be configured to work with Outlook. Do you have a link for how to do it?

I set my Gmail account to work with Outlook (I use Office 2019) some time ago but this link seems to show how to do it -
https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/off ... 0318c2c081

I use IMAP and this link from Google shows how to check that is set up - https://support.google.com/mail/answer/7126229?hl=en-GB

And if you use 2-step verification with Gmail (please tell me you do! and if not set it up now) then you will need to set up an app password (see the troubleshooting in the Google link above or here - https://support.google.com/accounts/answer/185833

[Midsmartin]

You can use any email you like in outlook.

Gmail supports IMAP, and can therefore be added to Outlook. You may need go into Gmail settings and enable it. You may also need to enable "less secure apps" in your Gmail account to make it work. Ask if you want help with that.

This is where you will come across some Gmail quirks. You won't see the "all mail" folder in outlook, but if you want it, just create it in the right places and it will populate.

What do you dislike about outlook.com? It is a pretty standard email service I thought. It is the one that should work best in outlook. If you say why you dislike outlook. Com and Gmail maybe we can help more.

Incidentally, your first post said you don't mind paying, which conflicts with your later post saying you don't like subscriptions.. Any paid email service is a subscription, with an annual fee.

[Infrasonic]

High volumes of spam would possibly indicate that address is 'in the wild' on a load of spammers databases having been involved in data breach(es) somewhere along the line...https://haveibeenpwned.com/

Not impossible to recover from - especially if you use an email service whereby you can bulk label spam as phishing to trigger the machine learning to block it completely in future.
My oldest Hotmail (outlook.com) address has suffered multiple data breaches but I've got the spam/phishing volume down to a few a week by consistently mass reporting.(Gmail requires you to report each message individually which is a pain.)

I've got multiple Gmail/Outlook.com/Yahoo/ Protonmail addresses plus other webmail providers and also my own domain address.
I use webmail and multiple clients as well as cross platform backup mirrors (Outlook.com backed up to Gmail via IMAP and POP for instance).
They all have their strengths and weaknesses. Many of the best features will end up migrating to the other providers over time.

Inbox deliverability issues are generally down to poor authentication implementation (SPF/DKIM/DMARC/ARC).
That's a two way street, it requires senders to be up to speed and abide by the current best practises as much as the recipient end.
I've had issues with legitimate bank emails being spam foldered or not delivered at all and it's down to sloppy authentication procedures on their end.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Email_authentication
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Authentic ... ived_Chain

One of the advantages of the major free players like Gmail/Outlook.com is they sort out their authentication chain out for you.
Likewise paid for services like MS O365 / Google workspace (aka G suite), but there you'll also have the option to customise everything yourself as needed via admin.
For domain mail especially having some redundancy in the system - like authenticated alternative SMTP options - is useful as well as things like how high you set your spam filters and what you do with it (auto deleting is possible but dangerous for the authentication chain reasons listed above).

If you look at the message source headers you'll see it all in practise. You can cut and paste those headers into 'readers' that will make more sense for non techies..https://mxtoolbox.com/EmailHeaders.aspx

[melonfool]

You hate Gmail when used with Outlook - What is there to dislike?

I was given to believe it could not be configured to work with Outlook. Do you have a link for how to do it?

I set my Gmail account to work with Outlook (I use Office 2019) some time ago but this link seems to show how to do it -
https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/off ... 0318c2c081

I use IMAP and this link from Google shows how to check that is set up - https://support.google.com/mail/answer/7126229?hl=en-GB

And if you use 2-step verification with Gmail (please tell me you do! and if not set it up now) then you will need to set up an app password (see the troubleshooting in the Google link above or here - https://support.google.com/accounts/answer/185833

I don't use TFA with the Gmail, but that's because I don't use the Gmail. I have it and it collects a load of mail from things I've subscribed to, but I only open it about twice a year.

I'll look into the Outlook issue.

Mel

[melonfool]

You can use any email you like in outlook.

Not sure about that. I have email.com and that's an app that I'm pretty sure can't go into Outlook.

Re paying, yes, you're right. I've bought Office so I guess I now don't want to pay for it again.

The set up for Gmail to go into Outlook looks a bit much for me to manage. I'll look at it.

What don't I like about Hotmail.......well, maybe if I can download it into Outlook I'll like it. I don't like the look of it online. It gets loads of spam and phishing. I find the folder set up awkward. I hate the way it thinks it can decide which emails I want and which I don't and have a "focus" folder on the landing page which is all junk, and a "secondary" folder which seems to be full of the emails I need!

Re Clara and junk - no, I've tried for years to tidy it up on the webmail. I've tried to blacklist things with key words. One time I added an email address to the blacklist and it somehow took it to mean "anything from this email" rather than "matches everything in this email" which since the email had @ in it and all emails have @ in them meant I got no emails. I phoned them to find out what was going on. They said I had set up the rule correctly and could not explain why it had done that and I basically lost two full days of emails which the server had deleted on receipt. Until I turned it off.

And yes, it appears on pwned, always has done.

Mel

[elkay]

You can use any email you like in outlook.

Not sure about that. I have email.com and that's an app that I'm pretty sure can't go into Outlook.

Mel

Did you mean mail.com?

They do provide support for email clients, including Outlook, on their premium package:
https://support.mail.com/premium/imap/outlook.html

[AF62]

I don't use TFA with the Gmail, but that's because I don't use the Gmail. I have it and it collects a load of mail from things I've subscribed to, but I only open it about twice a year.

Perhaps I should have been clearer, Google’s TFA is a single facility which covers all their products, not just Gmail. Even if you only use Google search but are signed in to Google then protecting your account (and the data which Google is holding) with TFA is a good idea - in fact using TFA on any service which offers it is a good idea.

[Infrasonic]

You can turn focused inbox off in settings. I hate it too and have it switched off across the board, all Outlook.com accounts -- webmail and desktop/mobile clients (W10 mail/Outlook).

You can take advantage of the Outlook.com (AKA Hotmail) anti spam infrastructure and use IMAP (all folders) or POP(Inbox) to import your existing email from other providers and then bulk report spam as phishing. It's a two click exercise once you've cleared any legit email from the junk email folder.
Select all, click the phishing button above right. Done.

Don't forward email if you can avoid it as that can cause delivery issues unless ARC is implemented (authenticated forwarding) which is not universal yet.

[BobbyD]

I'd recommend a domain for many reasons, possibly most pertinently because if you find yourself needing to change provider in the future you can simply take your domain and your email address with you.