2003-08-28 - 5:12 p.m.

What has happened to the free email services?

I remember years ago there were a gallon of them, and they worked. At least some of them worked, and some were nice. Where are they now? Emailaddresses.com has a big list of all kind of email address services, those free ones and upbradeables. Pop3 supported, webmail, fax supported, those in Chinese, Italian, Korean, Finnish etc. But the lists look so pale and short compared to the same lists a few years ago. Oh my.

I remembered I used lemel.fi for a long time. Then they changed everythng, and I lost it all. I had kept the messages only in their server, and they were gone. And after I discovered it, so was I.

I use(d) altern.org, and it was and still is very good. Free and no advertising, and works also in pop3. They took away a lot of features when it was used for spamming(?) so e.g. now you can't telnet to your email anymore. The last 2-3 weeks it's been down a lot, and I have had problems sending mail with it for months. It is annoying having to use an other address to answer from than what the mail was sent to. And if you travel, some dumb filters don't let you check your altern.org email as they think altern.org must be pr0n!

Iol.it and Libero.it were good and free. Now you can't use them with any email program, you are forced to use the webmail. In libero's case it is really annoying; If you don't like to see huge banners of nude women (yes, they claim they are a family site) it is not for you. Besides their antivirus service is about as effective as hotmail's. Wait, hotmale.com! So log in every few weeks and find those annoying as hell "Click here to see huge 15" horse cocks and small tiny teens" "asfdtgrhws, Click Here To Get Rid Of Your Debits" "re: your submisssion" "Click here to meet thousands of European women who want to meet you" "Mail Delivery System: Virus alert" "Click here for the latest MS Security alert" "Click here to make money in Ebay" "sadfgwqr, sdarf wrfdd ddffw!!".

So, not liking altern.org (but I use it, it's not so bad), nor lemel.fr, libero.it, iol.it, blu.it, hotmail.com ... I am still looking for the Perfect Email. Yahoo is as annoying as hotmail, but untill half a year ago (march '03) yahoo.it gave away free pop3-account if you were registered in Italy address for yahoo. That is gone, and so am I from yahoo except when I travel. Yahoo and hotmail work pretty well on the public internet services, but I don't trust them at all. I never use those to anything that I need to check frequently, and I never give that out for the companies that could spam me. Besides Echelon is out there and it's listening to you, reading your mails and so on. Big Brother is out there. And the last two things I trust in email are hotmail and yahoo. I've had for a long time all emails coming from hotmail, lycos, tripod etc delivered directly to trash (1 % of hotmail were actual mails, and 0 % tripod or lycos are). Now I don't care.

I hate the commercial messages in the end of emails. But sometimes I use one that has them - otherwise that email service works pretty well. Email.it allows still pop-use of it via an actual mail client, and the day they'll disable that service, I'll be gone.

Conclusions? I wish I had. There aren't any good ones out there any more, be ready to pay. Or don't complain or get annoyed of using webmail with hundreds of banners. Oh, wait - there were a few out there that do work actually: Spymac.com email, Macfora.com email (at least before it existed and was free), Apple.com (nearly; would apple.zzn.com be enough close for you?).

I have given up looking for the Perfect Email service so long ago. Now I use two services that are really fine: macosx.com and mac.com. Neither is free, but they do what I need and don't annoy me.

I was looking for a Perfect Email Client too. I've tried Mutt, mail.app of Mac OS X (Now using the one in Jaguar with MacGPG or GnuPG Privacy Guard), GnuMail, GyazMail, Kmail, Eudora, etc.

I wonder if there still are some nice services out there to try...