Future proofing email

[Caravan Monster]

I have various free webmail accounts which google and the other feckers are making generally worse, wanting more info like phone numbers to authenticate, less compatible with mail clients, have ridiculous user interfaces etc. I am prepared to go through the ballache of migrating to another service and to pay within reason but would like something that is likely to retain the same address long term as I use it for small business as well as personal. Maybe a 'junk' one for online purchasing and a 'proper' one for actual correspondence. My parents are reaching the age where power of attorney is on the horizon and have unreliable bt email so maybe buying a family domain name and running email from that is worth a look. What say the dosbods tech experts?

[DTMark]

Unless you have very special requirements somewhere like Fasthosts or Heart Internet should be fine. Other people can suggest other providers. Check the amount of storage space per mailbox you get - it's surprising how it can mount up these days.

You can buy the domain name and get some mailboxes with it together with setup instructions and it should all be straightforward.

If you send email to a lot of free mailboxes such as Hotmail you will at times have problems and they will bounce back at you - Hotmail is notorious for blacklisting providers' IP address ranges. We get this a lot but there's sadly nothing we can do about it. Except keep a Hotmail account for such occasions and send the email from there to another Hotmail user. It only takes one or two people to misbehave on shared servers for the entire mail server to get blacklisted for a while.

I believe you can also attach your own domain name to a Google (GMail) account though I've never tried it.

Moving the domain name to point at another provider should you elect to change later is also fairly easy. You own the domain name, not the provider. The domain name and the mailboxes can actually be entirely separate though you might as well start off with the simplest option and get them both from one of the commercial providers.

[Caravan Monster]

58 minutes ago, DTMark said:

Unless you have very special requirements somewhere like Fasthosts or Heart Internet should be fine.

The more I read up, buying a domain name increasingly appears the best solution. Basic email service looks reasonably priced, so long as they have POP and IMAP most should be ok. I don't do any bulk emailing, so hopefully should be ok with black listing. Time to have a laugh domain name shopping

[spunko]

Just to throw in another opinion, I would NOT bother with your own domain name for email. Unless you've got a load of time and money to throw at overcoming blacklists, it's rarely worth the pay off. I use my own @domain.co.uk emails for business but I run them through Gmail Business or whatever it's called. I can't see what is so wrong with them if you use Adblock, I never see ads on Gmail.

Pissing about with SPF and TXT records is really not fun.

[Caravan Monster]

27 minutes ago, The XYY Man said:

In what way is BT email unreliable...?

I have found it to be perfectly fine and fit for purpose for many years.

 

XYY

It might be their elderly boomer computer skills, but they are always moaning about it. I would imagine refusing to delete any emails probably pushes storage limits (think there was 14k emails in one inbox )

[spunko]

Of all the email accounts that people use on here, BT are the worst. So many times people have signed up with a @btinternet.com email only to say they never got the authentication email. 90% of these problems are BT. They're shite!

[Caravan Monster]

3 minutes ago, spunko said:

Just to throw in another opinion, I would NOT bother with your own domain name for email. Unless you've got a load of time and money to throw at overcoming blacklists, it's rarely worth the pay off. I use my own @domain.co.uk emails for business but I run them through Gmail Business or whatever it's called. I can't see what is so wrong with them if you use Adblock, I never see ads on Gmail.

Pissing about with SPF and TXT records is really not fun.

It's gmail forever messing with authentication for mail clients that pissed me off this time. They've started requiring the additional two stage authentication (ie they want to collect a phone number) to work with a mail client, so far as I can tell. Could just access accounts via a browser for the time being, I guess I'm just being resistant to being drawn further in to 'their' system and am prepared to pay and put the effort into getting out of it. Maybe I shouldn't worry about it because they've probably gathered plenty more info than that by this stage.

[BoSon]

Is there a current standard for email file formats beyond the .eml file extension used by Microsoft Windows Live Mail and others? Been using that for years as it's easy to sync backup all the email files, and as they are plain text there should be a way to access the content (without resorting to a text file editor and ignoring all the gobbledegook) as the big providers change tactics.

I'm still using Windows Live Mail on Windows 10 instead of the crappy mail client that comes as standard, as it gives me more control in consolidating several mail sources and saves them all as .eml for easy backup. I also prefer the classic user interface without all that 'AI' auto-filtering that the web mail clients seem to think I want. Just show me the damn emails in descending date order with a filter option. I guess there are UI designers that have to reinvent the wheel, gradually turning it from a circle to a square, to keep their job. 

EML format is much better than faffing about with Outlook PST files or other proprietary methods, but wonder if there's an even better future proof format around now that I should consider using instead?

I expect at some point Microsoft will stop supporting the Windows Live Mail app on Windows 10 and beyond so may have to resort to open source free alternative client apps to ensure any cloud based data is backed up under my control.

[Wight Flight]

Just buy caravanmonster.co.uk on 123reg.

You should be able to get email up and running in minutes.

Job done.

[goldbug9999]

Most email services have forwarding so create a gmail account and forward your other addresses to the gmail account. You can do this with any new domain base account as well. I have a domain name which I pretty much only use for email and that is forwarded to gmail (because its UI is vastly superior to pretty much very other webmail client).

[OurDayWillCome]

On 07/11/2019 at 16:22, DTMark said:

Unless you have very special requirements somewhere like Fasthosts

Thanks for the info :-) I hope you don’t mind me picking your brain. Fasthost offer Microsoft Exchange email - I’m going to be posting out products from two locations. Do you know if Exchange mail is a better option as it has a shared contacts facility?

[DTMark]

51 minutes ago, OurDayWillCome said:

Thanks for the info :-) I hope you don’t mind me picking your brain. Fasthost offer Microsoft Exchange email - I’m going to be posting out products from two locations. Do you know if Exchange mail is a better option as it has a shared contacts facility?

It could be a good answer if you need for example two email addresses (mailboxes) and each person needs to be able to see the same contact list (and calendar).

Just glancing at my GMail account which I rarely use - that has a contacts section but I don't know if it can be shared across mailboxes.

[onlyme]

Yes Exchange would be better (well that is the decision I came to), used an online hosted exchange service for one company and was very good, can't find the provider now but there's loads out there. 

 

[goldbug9999]

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Edited September 11, 2020 by goldbug9999