Are we doomed to use Google, Yahoo or Hotmail for mail?

[Greensky]

Sorry if creating this discussion is inappropriate - I'm not a frequent user of this forum.

As we are seeing many angry reactions of people after the sudden announcement that Lavabit would be suspended, I am also thinking of all these posts I've read here, of people trying to find alternatives to Gmail, Yahoo, Hotmail... and other such services, who don't offer basic guarantees for the privacy of users.

For me, Lavabit was a good alternative, and there certainly remain other alternatives. The trouble, however, is that those services are often fragile, and depend on one person who can decide to terminate them without notice - as we saw with Lavabit.

Therefore, I come to the somewhat depressing conclusion that we may have no real alternative to these big services who give our data to governments.

Any view on this?

[FredOnline]

Purely for e-mail only (leaving privacy concerns aside), you have to prepare for occurrences like this - don't have all your eggs in one basket, so to speak.

Make sure you have a secondary email account (with a different provider to your primary account) to fall back on.

Make sure you perform regular back-ups of your e-mails locally.

Consider all the important online companies that you deal with - make sure you have the secondary account linked to them where ever possible.

[Greensky]

That's very good advice, thank you. The idea of having an important number of accounts sounds good to me - I have about 15 now, and will probably increase this. Forums here give good ideas of other services to use.

I'd like to point out (because it's what "saved" me from a "Lavabit disaster") that I have always chosen email services that offer POP3 or IMAP, enabling me to store on my computer all my mails. I never leave emails on remote servers, or if that happens it's temporary, because I'm travelling.

That's probably the lesson I'll keep from Lavabit's end: to never rely on remote servers for mails, and for contacts...

[poma]

Originally Posted by FredOnline

Purely for e-mail only (leaving privacy concerns aside), you have to prepare for occurrences like this - don't have all your eggs in one basket, so to speak.

Yeah, our number of baskets decreases and now we have to select more :(

[drew]

Are we doomed to use Google, Yahoo or Hotmail for mail?

I wish I knew. We would need someone that have deep insight in how far reaching
this PRISM thing really is.

So maybe one have to accept that there is no way to have any privacy at all?

Re Lavabit backup: I had sat up a pull on Live.com so it has all the latest
lavabit emails saved on their HD so I was lucky that way. Only lost very old emails.

Not all my mails but the latest so I can contact them
and tell about change of email address to live.com instead

[Dutchie007]

@Greensky: nobody is forcing you tu use ANY free or paid email service.

It´s all up to you. I personaly make a balance between usefullness and privecy issues.
OO and offcourse I prefer FREE things....but if you have the bucks to burn (or the euros) you can also use many paid services out there.

yes sure..Gmail is very good.(who would I be to deny that?)..and free...BUT...but...there are privecy issues. And after they locked down my main account 2 years ago I went in a panic...thats when I started looking for alternatives. Luckely for me after 10 days I could log into my Gmail account:-) Yes,.,...I also start doing some backs ups;-)

For me also is important storage space....if they have Imap or POP3 etc...etc...etc...

Continuety is also important......if that is your thing you should stick to the big wellknown players like Yahoo,AOL,Gmail or Hotmail/Outlook. But we must give new players on the market a fair oppertunity.

If you paid attention on this forum lately we were discussing several (mainly free) email services OUTSIDE the USA. It´s not that we are against the USA but we don´t like PRISM and things like that. Besides the NSA and other agencies or companies themselves also can (and will) snoop arround in your emails. It´s up to you what you write in your emails and were you use them for.

I for myself think it is IMPOSSIBLE that you can avoid that some 3 letter agency will be snooping arround in your emails!
We all have to live with that I guess. I just try to make the best of it.

Dutchie.

[chrisretusn]

I've been using email a long time, long before they had web mail. Messages were not stored on the service like they are today. You downloaded them and deleted them from the server. I still follow that practice today. All of my personal accounts are POP3, messages are download and deleted from the server. So a service closing down is not really an issue for me.

I do have a couple of IMAP accounts, they are for work. In this case I have my client sync with the server to ensure I have all of the messages stored locally. Comes in handy for off-line reading.

From the very beginning I have taken the attitude that email is not private. I have accounts with Gmail, Yahoo! and Outlook. I have accounts with other smaller services too. I my view, none of them are "secure", none of them are private. It is my own belief that much of what we here today about governments sucking in all our data are way over blown and mostly a result of the media capitalizing on events to bring in the bacon. I'd call it the Snowden Effect.

[like1980]

I too have recently came back from IMAP/online storage with the great search & filter features to local storage of emails.

The trade-off is that having all emails offline means with your mobile devices you never have access to everything. But as yourself if you need access to all your emails on your phone? I don't.

[Tsunami]

Originally Posted by Dutchie007

@ for myself think it is IMPOSSIBLE that you can avoid that some 3 letter agency will be snooping arround in your emails!
We all have to live with that I guess. I just try to make the best of it.

If your email host is outside the States but you email to someone whose host is in the US, then your correspondance ends up in the US anyway. To avoid any contact with the American legal system all your email contacts should switch to a non-US provider too.

But as for the original question, alternatives enough that seem to be around for a long time:
mail.ru
yandex.ru
mail.by
centrum.cz
seznam.cz
web.de
gmx.com
mail.be
inmail.sk
laposte.fr
terra.es
virgilio.it
safe-mail.net
eumx.net
mail.az
email.lv
qq.com
myopera.com



All been around for years and not too likely to give up anytime soon. You yes, there are alternatives to Hotmail; Google, Yahoo, AOL etc.

[kijinbear]

No matter which company you decide to go with, the most important thing to remember is that you should use your own domain.

Losing a few years' worth of email archives is one thing. Losing the email address itself and not being able to reset your password on any other account linked to that address is a very different thing, and it's much more inconvenient than the former. Backups will allow you to safeguard the contents of your mailbox, but the mailbox itself is forever gone and anyone who tries to contact you will be greeted with a cold, impersonal, indecipherable message from MAILER-DAEMON.

Don't get yourself held hostage to someone else's domain, whether it's @gmail.com, @hotmail.com, @fastmail.fm, or anything else. Get your own domain and host it with an email service provider (ESP) of your choice. If you don't like your ESP, or if your ESP suddenly goes down the drain, you can just move your domain somewhere else and nobody else needs to know that you've changed your ESP. It's just like moving your telephone contract to a different company while keeping the same number.

Of course, this costs money. A typical domain costs about $10 per year, but anyone who buys more than one crappy McDonald's coffee a month can easily afford that. The same is true of free vs. paid ESPs. Nothing is really free. If you're not paying for your email, someone else is paying for it, and it's no surprise that whoever is paying for your email has control over your email. There are lots of excellent email options remaining in this world, from $12/year PolarisMail to $120/year LuxSci, if you're willing to vote with your wallet.

[just1acc]

Originally Posted by Tsunami

If your email host is outside the States but you email to someone whose host is in the US, then your correspondance ends up in the US anyway. To avoid any contact with the American legal system all your email contacts should switch to a non-US provider too.

But as for the original question, alternatives enough that seem to be around for a long time:
mail.ru
yandex.ru
mail.by
centrum.cz
seznam.cz
web.de
gmx.com
mail.be
inmail.sk
laposte.fr
terra.es
virgilio.it
safe-mail.net
eumx.net
mail.az
email.lv
qq.com
myopera.com

All been around for years and not too likely to give up anytime soon. You yes, there are alternatives to Hotmail; Google, Yahoo, AOL etc.

Nice list Tsunami.

Though...Gmx has most servers (except .net ones) in US and 1&1 isn't bulletproof to NSA, neither their track record says so. And for qq.com, the chinease governmental nose is much more picky than US one.

[savit]

openmailbox.org seems to be good ?
there is another recent thread in this forum about it.

[savit]

Originally Posted by kijinbear

No matter which company you decide to go with, the most important thing to remember is that you should use your own domain.

Losing a few years' worth of email archives is one thing. Losing the email address itself and not being able to reset your password on any other account linked to that address is a very different thing, and it's much more inconvenient than the former. Backups will allow you to safeguard the contents of your mailbox, but the mailbox itself is forever gone and anyone who tries to contact you will be greeted with a cold, impersonal, indecipherable message from MAILER-DAEMON.

Don't get yourself held hostage to someone else's domain, whether it's @gmail.com, @hotmail.com, @fastmail.fm, or anything else. Get your own domain and host it with an email service provider (ESP) of your choice. If you don't like your ESP, or if your ESP suddenly goes down the drain, you can just move your domain somewhere else and nobody else needs to know that you've changed your ESP. It's just like moving your telephone contract to a different company while keeping the same number.

Of course, this costs money. A typical domain costs about $10 per year, but anyone who buys more than one crappy McDonald's coffee a month can easily afford that. The same is true of free vs. paid ESPs. Nothing is really free. If you're not paying for your email, someone else is paying for it, and it's no surprise that whoever is paying for your email has control over your email. There are lots of excellent email options remaining in this world, from $12/year PolarisMail to $120/year LuxSci, if you're willing to vote with your wallet.

well said
but what about personal mail id?
what domain name would be appropriate for personal email id? Especially if one does'nt want to have one's own website with that domain?

[xmailer]

Originally Posted by Tsunami

But as for the original question, alternatives enough that seem to be around for a long time:
mail.ru
yandex.ru
mail.by
centrum.cz
seznam.cz
web.de
gmx.com
mail.be
inmail.sk
laposte.fr
terra.es
virgilio.it
safe-mail.net
eumx.net
mail.az
email.lv
qq.com
myopera.com

By email.lv, did you by chance mean inbox.lv? From what I can tell, email.lv doesn't appear to be an email service.

[Jack]

Originally Posted by like1980

I too have recently came back from IMAP/online storage with the great search & filter features to local storage of emails.

The trade-off is that having all emails offline means with your mobile devices you never have access to everything. But as yourself if you need access to all your emails on your phone? I don't.

The best compromise is to use POP3, and have your e-mails deleted on the server after... say... three weeks. That will leave the last three weeks worth of e-mail available on the server for you to access from your mobile device, which should be sufficient for most.