Email provider advice please

From my email provider BT yesterday:

From 6 May 2016, we're changing the price of BT Premium Mail from £1.60 a month to £5 a month.

Maybe I'm being unreasonable in objecting to BT trebling their Mail price, as their multi-million TV sport deals must be paid for somehow. I left BT after many years because of unreliability and have been satisfied with Plusnet for the past 18 months, but kept our BT email for continuity. Anyway we found it very difficult to set up PN's own email service and its support staff were unhelpful and totally disinterested.

I would like to keep our existing mail system as my wife and I are too long in the tooth to change. We use Thunderbird and have two addresses/boxes, one for me and one for my wife. The past seven years' emails are stored in folders and the Thunderbird program folder contains 80MB, I don't know if this includes the years of stored emails or not. We do not need webspace, sync across devices etc. just the handling of say 10 emails per week. We seldom send attachments.

Free providers such as Gmail might do but Google's snooping gives me the creeps. I do have a couple of disposable gmail addresses to keep RL info offline on occasion and I'm amazed to see these entities pop up together whenever I watch Youtube, with appeals to SIGN IN NOW for an even better experience ...

I am considering Fastmail, which offers a $US10 annual 'Lite' package which meets my needs, and TSO, which at £10 monthly is very expensive for all we want. I would be very grateful for the advice of all you TBB posters.

Edited by Malwaremike (Tue 22-Mar-16 12:30:45)

TSOHost is used a lot around here - £15 per annum for that sort of lite hosting (which includes a lot more than just email). Another £7ish will get you a domain name so you can then change providers if you want in future without having to change email addresses again.

You made the mistake on TSO of looking at Exchange hosting - that is way over the top for what you need. All you need is the basic lite "cloud web hosting" that will give you 10 mailboxes, 500MB web space, 5GB data transfer per month and a few other bits and pieces.

I've used FastMail for both business and personal email for 10 years now and would be reluctant to change if I had to.
The service is reliable with a good web interface and quite extensive configuration options. There's also the opportunity to set up a forwarding service to pull your mail from your BT account in the changeover period. Plenty of FastMail domains to choose from if you don't have your own.
Go for a trial and try it out!

1&1 is another option which I have experience with and works well. £0.99 per month for 1 mailbox, £1.99 for 20 (exc. vat and domain cost). Make sure whatever service you choose supports SSL/TLS for client connections.

Edited by Oliver341 (Tue 22-Mar-16 13:38:59)

I agree Tsohost is excellent, not least because of the superb support if ever needed.

Lite hosting is £14.99pa and a .uk, or .co.uk, or .me.uk £7.19pa. Set up and running within minutes.

The hosting does of course also include hosting for two websites (domains) should that be desired.

Thunderbird will work exactly as the OP is used to, and can have the new addresses running for sending and receiving on the new domain simultaneously with continuing to read on the BT one until all contacts are notified.

Edited by RobertoS (Tue 22-Mar-16 14:00:06)

1&1 get my vote too.

+1 for TSOhost, I have several Mailboxes for convenience and it all works well with Thunderbird on the PC and AquaMail on the Andorid smartphone.

I have Plusnet email working with Thunderbird without any problems. I even retained the service after leaving Plusnet.

If you can't get Plusnet email to work with Thunderbird you may struggle to get any other email service to work with it.

I would suggest having your own domain name and using an email forwarding service such as 123-reg. This allows you to change email service providers whilst retaining the same domain name.

I would like to thank the OP for asking that question as I am looking for a new host myself after the price hike.
Thanks to all the info guys

To be honest most people will be just fine with Gmail, there's no need to pay for a host unless you really must have your own domain name. I can't fault their service.