E-Mail Host

One of the things that I take into account before changing ISPs is the 'pain' associated with changing my e-mail address. I am considering paying for an e-mail host ( rather than using Yahoo, Googlemail etc). Online reviews of e-mail hosting providers are are very hard to find. Personal recommendations would therefore be greatly appreciated. I should add that this is for personal use only and I would prefer a provider that offers both POP and IMAP at a reasonable cost. My present ISP only offers POP and very long e-mail addresses!

I use http://www.verygoodemail.com/

Are you thinking about registering and using your own domain name?

And what do you consider "reasonable cost"?

I use this mob (with my own domain also bought through them), had a few issues with reliability when I first started several years ago but no problems since.

If you click the "More details" link in the Instant Mail box you'll see they offer IMAP and POP3, but I don't use IMAP so don't know if it's either or both.

Edited by billford (Fri 16-Aug-13 08:55:36)

If you use POP3 then it would be pointless to use IMAP as well. POP3 (normally) downloads and removes the mail from the provider's systems - so if you then logged in with IMAP there would be nothing to see.

Personally I prefer to use IMAP with my mail clients set to store a copy locally. That way I've got offline access to my mailboxes on each client, can use the provider's webmail to see the entire mailbox when required and if something were to go catastrophically wrong resulting in all my client machines being destroyed there is still a copy of the mailbox contents with the provider. That's not suggesting it as a substitute for keeping good backups, just a useful addition to them.

Edited by deleted (Fri 16-Aug-13 09:09:49)

In reply to a post by GeeTee:

If you use POP3 then it would be pointless to use IMAP as well.

Yes I know, that's why I don't use it.

But, if he should so desire, there's nothing I can see that would would prevent the OP from using POP3 with one email address and IMAP with another, hence my comment.

Ahhh... quite so - I should really get beyond my first cup of tea in the morning before posting

Out of interest, why do you prefer POP3?

In reply to a post by GeeTee:

Ahhh... quite so - I should really get beyond my first cup of tea in the morning before posting

I know the feeling well

Out of interest, why do you prefer POP3?

I'm not entirely sure... partly I suspect it's my reluctance to trust my data to others (eg anything I've got in the cloud is also on either my "live" or backup HDD ) but probably mostly because I just don't really get on with it for some reason

In reply to a post by billford:

I'm not entirely sure... partly I suspect it's my reluctance to trust my data to others (eg anything I've got in the cloud is also on either my "live" or backup HDD ) but probably mostly because I just don't really get on with it for some reason

Fair enough, I also wouldn't trust anything to a "cloud" service if that were the only copy. Anything of any real importance I have stored in at least 3 places locally and additionally regular encrypted backup copies pushed out to a couple of dropbox like services. Probably overkill, but it's mostly automated so all gain no pain (other than getting the automation working in the first place).

Let me sweep up a couple of issues. My current ISP offers POP3 only whereas my previous ISP offered both POP3 and IMAP. Sadly, e-mail was down fair too often for my liking. Currently, we have 4 Apple devices in the house. They are all set to POP3. Previously, I had my IPhone, IPad and Macbook set to IMAP and my main desktop set to POP3 with the same e-mail address. This meant that I could clear all the rubbish off my portable devices at one go but I still had all my e-mails on my main computer.

I note that most e-mail hosts come with a domain. An email address of [email protected] has to be better than my current e-mail address which is @domain.myisp.co.uk.

Thanks for all the inputs.