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Everyone.Net
Personally, I love
service provided by Everyone.net. For about $40 a year, you get your own domain name and ten full-featured POP3 email accounts. You can use your own email program (Outlook, Outlook Express, Eudora or whatever you prefer) or you can read your messages on web using a simple interface. Everyone.Net also has a very simple filtering capability, which I've found is great for getting rid of spam. This service is perfect for someone who needs a lot of email accounts without any effort, perhaps for a family or group of friends.
Purchase a Domain Name and Forward Your Email
James S. Huggins wrote an article which explains in detail how to purchase a domain and forward email from that domain to your ISP's account. The concept is as follows:
- You purchase a domain for about $9.00 a year from a registrar which allows for email forwarding. NameCheap is one of these. Let's say you registered "johnsmith.com"
- Park web site on their server. This presents a single page which says site is under construction.
- Use NameCheap system to forward all email to "yourname@johnsmith.com" to your own personal ISP email account.
What is advantage of this? Since everyone will be sending email to yourname@johnsmith.com, you can change ISP's all you want. You don't have to worry about changing your email address - you only have to change one forwarding address.
Purchase web Hosting
Contrary to popular belief, paid web hosting is not very expensive. In fact, all but very worst paid hosting services provide far superior service and features than best free host.
One of features that is provided with many paid hosting services is a number of POP3 accounts. You can use these for your own email account as well.
Other Alternatives
Believe me, I do understand that companies on internet need to make a profit. I also know that many companies which offered free services are struggling with what to do about failure of banner ad and internet advertising in general.
I firmly believe that "advertising supported" concept on internet is basically flawed, unethical and simply does not work. People should pay for whatever services they use at a reasonable rate. The concept of having someone else pay for service in order to display advertising tends to distance user (the web site or email user) from vendor (the free mail provider) because customer is actually advertiser and not user. This results in poor service and oftentimes a complete lack of responsibility for actual users of services.
However, some of larger, more traditional free email providers have habitually offered horrible (at best) customer service and have proven time and again that they could not care less about their users. These companies have come up with business models that simply did not work and built tremendous organizations on top of those models.
By purchasing new pay services from these companies, you will get same horrible customer service and lack of care (because these are same organizations), only now you will be paying to be abused.
The final and perhaps most important argument against giving money to these previously free services is they tend towards extraordinarily expensive side when compared with alternatives. The only advantage to staying with one of these free services (as far as I can see) is you won't have to change. And sometimes, my friends, change is a good thing.
Additional Reading
Own Your Own Email Address http://www.jamesshuggins.com/h/web1/own_your_own_email_address.htm
An excellent article by James S. Huggins about how to purchase a domain name and create forwarding addresses.
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