Email provider - recommendations???

quidsinquentin

I need to set up a reliable email account for a business. Can anyone recommend anything/anyone?

Preferably:

Free (but will pay for a good service)
Good spam filter
Reliable
anything else you can think of.

We had an Orange email account, but Orange have 'lost' it (seriously) and all the contacts in it.

Cheers all

C_Ronaldo

Gmail

good spam filter, its free, alot of storage

isofa

The Feb issue of Computer Shopper reviews all free email (mainly web-based), and also mentions those which can integrate with Outlook, such as Yahoo...

However if it's for business, and you want to create the right image, free email sometimes doesn't cut the mustard! I'd suggest you have a domain name with a commercial service from a decent ISP (Zen come highly recommended), or basic POP3 provider.
However you can of course route domain name email to a free Gmail or other account. It depends how professional you wish to appear.

I keep free Gmail and Hotmail for emergencies, but everything goes through my main provider and domain for business.

Farway

I second isofa, for business avoid the free ones, it does not give good impression IMO

However if you are a used car salesman then a hotmail account with a mobile phone number would do fine

davros_3

I second recommendation for gmail, absolutely tip top
one of best features is it keeps all replies back and forth as one "conversation" a very useful feature

espresso

Surely for your own business, your own domain is the professional way to go. You have already experienced what can happen with free ISP e-mail.

mattogier

I would suggest (as have others) that you go for you own domain name - it's tax deductible - and will give the right image!

I would ALSO suggest that you DO NOT use the providers SPAM filter, get a gmail account AND use something like Thunderbird fro the following reasons...

SPAM filters can filter out non SPAM - this MAY be business - if you use Thunderbird it has it's own adaptive SPAM filtering system so at last you can SEE the SPAM that has been filtered out and periodically check it for wanted mail.

Gmail provide an almost limitless repository for email - I have set up Thunderbird filters to copy ALL incoming mail and BCC ALL outgoing mail to my gmail account - this provides a secondary backup (on top of USB hard drive) in the event that my system fails.

I also have set up Thunderbird to delete incoming messages from the server after 30 days so again I have a back up!

robt_2

Get you own domain name (£10 at the very most) and set it up for gmail.

unrich

http://www.simplymailsolutions.com

get your own domain, they have spam (you can see the spam and let what yuo want through) filtering.

It costs and spam filter costs more.

You can send/receive from ANY PC if you need to

robt_2

unrich wrote: »

http://www.simplymailsolutions.com

get your own domain, they have spam (you can see the spam and let what yuo want through) filtering.

It costs and spam filter costs more.

You can send/receive from ANY PC if you need to

You can use gmail on any pc too. If you prefer, you can use an email program with it instead.

Dmoz

Get a decent domain name (123-reg are the cheapest around) and set it up for mail forwarding to a Gmail account - this way you get brilliant spam filtering (Gmail lets through about 5 spam e-mails into my inbox of the 2400 I receive monthly) as well as easy searching.

Gmail have also just added IMAP which means that you can sync your account with all your different devices eg. mobile phone, outlook and the web interface (which is also top-notch).

Example: I read 3 messages out of 75 new on my mobile phone on the way into work. When I check my account from gmail.com, those 3 messages show up as read, and I only have 72 "unread" messages.

Set up Gmail to spoof the sent by: address to your original (forwarded) e-mail address. This is very easy to do from Gmail's settings section.

Example:

dmoz@businessdomain.com forwards to dmozgmail@gmail.com, where spam is eliminated. If I then want to reply to e-mails, the recipients of the reply see the e-mail as coming from dmoz@businessdomain.com, even though I sent the e-mail through Gmail.

You can also configure Gmail to work through Outlook using IMAP, meaning you don't even see the adverts on gmail.com (though these can be disabled using Greasemonkey scripts anyway).

FYI I don't work for Gmail