Independent email service - Where to go/how

robin58

I wonder if the wonderful people on this site can help me with advice.

I have now moved to Plusnet but still have my o2 email account active.

The thing is I don't want to set up my main email with the Plusnet email service due to the fact I will have to pay £20 to keep it active if I move in the future.

The o2 email account I am with will stay active as long as I sign in/use it within a 90 day period. After 90 days it dies.

What I am asking is there away to have an independent email service which I can link to me personally.

I do not want to sign up with Outlook or Gmail to have a standalone service as I find these services are to easy to hack into. Then you get submerged in :spam::spam::spam:

What I am after is a service which would give me a 'one place' to have an email account, with the ability to have multiple sub email addresses.

This is to allow me to have a main email for all the important stuff and lower email accounts for the less important emails eg signing up for stuff from less trustworthy companies on a 'dumper email account'. Or an email account address to give to people to write to who I don't want to have the main one.

Don't mind paying for the service but it must be secure and of course not too expensive.
( True MSE style )

I then I might be maybe be able to put into one place all the email account message services I have had since being on the internet - 5 at last count :eek: and all still active!!

Hope I have made sense. If not ask me questions. I will not bite! Promise

Kendall80

Its not especially helpful to you but i've used hotmail (outlook) for 15 years now. I've not been hacked as you suggested above and the spam is almost entirely diverted to the junk folder.

It also permits multiple aliases (I use one for my banking/investing) and you can link in accounts such as gmail and probably your O2 one.

Edit: Outlook also has the added advantage of the onedrive cloud storage and online free MSOffice programs which I use daily.

Armorica

Who is Gmail easy to hack into for?

The gmail spam filter is generally excellent - the spammer isn't going to care whether you are with gmail or another provider once it has your address.

Gmail also provide additional authenication - a code that is sent to my phone must be entered for anyone to get access to my account and ip address logging which is visible to users. (Other than industrial/nation state hacking of the entire service...)

Most major services provide for multiple addresses now - either directly, or through forwarding/pop3 checking.

Nilrem

If you want a reasonably secure email service that lets you create temporary/sub accounts for different uses you would probably do best to buy a domain and get a half decent hosting package.
Unfortunately this will likely cost you a fiver a year for the domain name, and anything from free to £100+ per year for the hosting package (avoid the cheapest and free ons though, as they tend to lack customer support or have hidden issues).

Personally I use a domain I got years ago and a hosting package that costs about £60 a year (it also gives me a load of space for storing/sharing pictures etc), but it lets me manage my email addresses easily and to have separate email aliases for pretty much every retailer.
So for example when I started to get spam addressed to retailerXorder@mydomain.com I was able to close that alias down (I can start it back up again in the future if I want).

Having your own domain is about the only way you never have to worry about the company you're with deciding to close it's email services (as you can move hosting companies easily taking your doamin with you).

Having said that for general use I tend to find gmail is pretty good, and very secure these days.
One thing I'll say as usual, and this applies to anything, don't use the same password for different sites, especially for email services (which can if compromised open up your online shopping accounts to the criminals).

spenderdave

Strongly endorse getting your own domain with email (it can be very cheap, even free). As for the old O2 email, as far as I know it does not expire after 90 days thought there has been some suggestion that it may be discontinued in the future - it has already closed for O2 mobile customers, those of us who were transferred to Sky have been assured it will stay. Best to move anyway.

J_B

I have my own domain name and use 1&1 for my e mail

http://www.1and1.co.uk/

djp64

You can get your own domain name (as already suggested) and then set the 'Catch All Fowarding' address to be whatever your current ISP supplied email address is.

This will cost approx £7 every two years.

I have my own domain name and have different email addresses based on the domain name for all online activity e,g. mse@debbiemse.co.uk, edf@debbiemse.co.uk. If any of these addresses get compromised / spammed I change them and add in a spam / junk mail rule to filter them out.

In the settings for the domain name I have set catch all forwarding to forward any emails to my domain name email addresses to my current ISP supplied email address (which happens to be plusnet).

When I change ISP I just change the email address in the catch all forwarding.

Debbie

Collabora

Nilrem wrote: »

you would probably do best to buy a domain and get a half decent hosting package.

If its just for emails, yes get a domain ( a .uk domain about £10 a year), but you then just need an email hosting plan ( a plan that will just allow you to set up emails accounts) this will be £1 a month. a service like https://www.123-reg.co.uk/email-hosting/personal-email-packages.shtml

Jivesinger

djp64 wrote: »

I have my own domain name and have different email addresses based on the domain name for all online activity e,g. mse@debbiemse.co.uk, edf@debbiemse.co.uk. If any of these addresses get compromised / spammed I change them and add in a spam / junk mail rule to filter them out.

In the settings for the domain name I have set catch all forwarding to forward any emails to my domain name email addresses to my current ISP supplied email address (which happens to be plusnet).

I'm interested in doing the same thing as the OP.

My understanding is that if you buy a domain through a domain registration company, you may still need to do something to create a mailbox somewhere in your domain name to initially 'catch' the emails, which you can then redirect to an ISP address.

Or maybe Plusnet allow you to host your own domain address directly?

If so then I suspect this is easier with Plusnet and might be harder to achieve with other ISPs such as BT?

enkoda

As Armorica has already said, I fail to see how it's any easier to hack into a gmail account than any other email account?

I have 2-step verification set up on mine so that any hacker would need my mobile phone as well as my password.
The spam filter is very good too.

And it's free.

securityguy

robin58 wrote: »

I do not want to sign up with Outlook or Gmail to have a standalone service as I find these services are to easy to hack into. Then you get submerged in :spam::spam::spam:

Gmail's two-step verification is second to none. The only people whose gmail
accounts get hacked into are people too lazy or stupid to set it up.

Accounts being hacked into are orthogonal to spam. GMail's spam filtering
is excellent.