h2g2 The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: Earth Edition

after months of being thoroughly fed up with yaschmoo, i'm looking for another free email service. i do not, however, know what services exist.

can anyone nudge me in the right direction?

Go to a seach engine and search "Free e-mail services"
it will lead you to a few

I can think of a possible worse one hotmail...

Well what do you expect from Microsoft?

I got one. it took me some time fiddling with the filters, but now everything containing MSN in the title is flunged directly into the dustbin

Can't wait till I get enough money to get a Killer Mac!

msn is my isp and i can't wait to get out of my contract! i haven't used msn/hotmail in over a year... but i do most of my internet business from work. for obvious reasons i don't want my yahoogroups memberships going to my work email, and up until recently yahoo mail had worked out very well. over the last few months however i've been inundated with spam and i can't stand it any more.

i've been told about excite, altavista, and netscape, but i'm sure there must be others. i was also looking for any reccomendations of one service over others if anyone had advice to offer.

I haven't had much trouble with yahoo yet...

I have but as I like getting email from my clubs(now called groups) so I don't have to visit all 20 individually to see if there are any messages that interest me,it's rather hard to filter out yahoo mail without cutting off my groups emails.As my email address is open to all members this means I'm getting some very questionable mail(disgusting some of it too).I've tried setting up a filter at Yahoo mail so it only affects individuals but that doesn't always cover every piece of spam.

I'm learning to live with it and I just delete it but not before I run it through a plugin I've installed from Cloudmark called Spamnet.It's rather good.Any spam I get I notify Spamnet who then add it to their database.If enough people inform them of a particular spammer then they are passed around the network as spam nuisances and the filter directs any future attacks into a spam folder from which I delete the offending emails.

I don't think that it is possible to avoid spam however,even if you are very careful about who you give your email to and always tick or untick the privacy related boxes.They are very devious.

Incog.

Free Email Providers: some 1,400 free services in 85 countries at http://www.fepg.net
Also a good website is http://www.net4nowt.com

Just curious (as one who has a hotmail account) what's so wrong?

Although is rather pleased with the free 6mb storage at everyone.net

http://www.operamail.com

I have used Care2 since before I even had a computer. I also have a hotmail account, a yahoo account and two different ISP accounts. I find that most spam arrives at the accounts that I use as signups here and there,around the internet. So basically when spam arrives I can just about pinpoint who is passing on the address.

That, of course, doesn't help to stop the spam. However if you have a few addresses then you can limit the spam to certain ones and reserve others for family, friends or business.

I am in Canada and have family members in various countries. I have found that the spam quotient varies from country to country.

Bottom line? Have one account that you use for interntet wandering; one for family; one for friends; one for business and one for whatever

Beth

Hotmail... adverts, unblockable spam, history of poor security, slow... people may assume you're new to the internet or otherwise clueless...

Admittedly I use Yahoo for my main email account, which isn't exactly great -- however, if you pay them $20 or thereabouts you can check email without going to their website... and provided your username isn't too obvious, and you're careful, you won't get too much spam.

There *are* ways of dealing with spam... I've just hacked together a system which requires people to request to be put on the 'white list' before I can see their mail... if a mail is blocked a response is sent explaining the system. In addition, obvious spam is rooted out and obvious non-spam is allowed immediately.

There's a commercial version of this somewhere... can't remember what it's called, though...

I'm lucky because I'm in a group of very geeky friends. We have email addresses of the form userid@domain, as usual but we can use userid-anything@domain where the anything is replaced by anything we like. When I use news, sign up to anything on the web, put my email address on a webpage or post to a yahoo group, I use a different email address (eg userid-news@domain, userid-h2g2@domain, userid-yahoogroupname@domain) and that way I can tell exactly the source of the spam by which address they are using.

The other useful thing is that my mail is processed on a linux server on which I have an account and so I can use spamassassin and procmail to filter my mail into different folders depending on what it is for example mailing lists, friends and spam.

Hotmail is really notorious for getting spam - especially pornospam - and yet a lot of my Guides (Girl Scouts, basically 10-14 year old girls) have hotmail addresses. I did a session on internet safety with them not so long ago and a lot of them had been hiding the fact they get such stuff from their parents and were upset by it. With youngsters, it is reccommended to have 2 addresses - private (friends only) and public (for use generally online and filtered by parents.) I'm seriously thinking of (when I'm not a skint student) sorting out getting a server hosted and providing them with pairs of email addresses, and various units with webhosting.

I had an old yahoo account which I abandoned due to excessive spam, I foolishly replied to a couple of messages asking to unsubscribe...it's now been deleted because I didn't check it for 6 months or so.

My current yahoo account gets quite a bit of spam (about 3 mails a week that get through the bulk mail filter). Are you using the bulk mail filter? The yahoo groups mails shouldn't get removed but you can always set up a filter to look for "yahoo groups" or whatever in the message/title and filter them into your inbox (over-riding the bulk mail filter). Do you use the block address facility to block the worst offenders. I also filter anything which contains the words dollars, penis, viagra, "lose weight" and "call toll free" straight into the bulk mail folder. I've also filtered out a couple of offenders by their domain name (always different email addresses but the same bit after the @ sign). It takes a while but it is worth it.

Oh and you can always set up another yahoo account and get another yahoo email account.

www.talk21.com is alright

I've never got spam at hotmail...I must just be lucky I guess.

www.yourmom.com
www.someidiot.com

Both these sites provide free email. And who wouldn't want an address that read: (some name)@yourmom.com?