What email provider is best?

tronator

Gillor wrote: »

Am I serious when I say whitelisting prevents all spam reaching your inbox, then yes.

You're wrong. Sometimes you get SPAM supposedly from people you know. This happens when a third person with an infected PC has both of you in his address book and the virus/malware choses one of these email addresses as From. And even if it eliminates 100% of SPAM, how many genuine emails end up in your SPAM folder?

Gillor wrote: »

And, by implication, everyone else is an idiot? What condescending tosh!

No comment to this ;-)

Gillor wrote: »

All systems are flawed, but never mind how to set up a whitelist, how it works in practice, the fors and againsts and any other form of objective discussion - Tronator has spoken so that's that. End of discussion.

No system is 100% accurate, but your's is one of the most flawed, just behind the system, where the sender gets an email response where he needs to click a link and only after that the email gets delivered to the recipient. Fun if both use the same "system".

Whitelisting only makes sense (if at all) in addition to another system, like a bayes filter for instance. I take it that you don't run a business or get other important email...

walesrob

Also consider Fastmail https://www.fastmail.fm/ . This is a paid for service, but there's no advertising, no social 'intrusion' ala G+ or FB, there's POP and IMAP access, file storage, proper professional email service. You can set up something called aliases which can be easily deleted later if too much spam appears. You can also configure the spam filter, create identities, create discard rules, pick up your Hotmail, Gmail or Yahoo emails, filter messages, in short, Fastmail can do so much more than any FREE webmail provider.

I always recommend buying your own domain name and creating your own email address, so you will never be tied to any email service ever again.

skivenov

Personally, I rather like yahoo. Been using it for about 10 years.

Gillor

tronator wrote: »

And even if it eliminates 100% of SPAM, how many genuine emails end up in your SPAM folder?

Initially all emails are treated as "untrusted" until they are added to the safelist/whitelist.

The user then decides which emails to add to the safelist/whitelist, not some arbitrary spam filter, beysian or otherwise. In other words the user has total control.

For many users, missing legitimate email is worse than receiving spam. With Thunderbird you get notification of all received emails direct to your desktop, whichever folder they arrive in. It's then simply a matter of viewing the contents of the Junk folder and deciding whether to add any of those contacts to the whitelist.

As contacts are added to the whitelist over a period of time, so-called false positives reduce to nearer zero as the safelist/whitelist is built up. When any "genuine" emails from new but, at that stage, untrusted sources are received simply decide whether to whitelist them or not. Again, the user has full control.

It works for me but, hey, if it's not for you then fine.

tronator wrote: »

I take it that you don't run a business or get other important email...

Do you now. Yet another example of making assumptions you can't substantiate, delivered in your usual patronisingly superior style.