The reliable mail services
 

What I have long used and I felt they are reliable.
1. gmail
2. fastmail/pobox
3. web.de/gmx.net
4. Mail.de
5. Yahoo (though many ADs)
6. Proton (though slow access)

Not so reliable:
1. iCloud - silent filtering
2. Outlook - the same issue as iCloud
3. T-online - whitelist for incoming messages
4. Yandex - almost every message was identified as spam

What’s your experience on using different mail?

My lists:
Reliable: Gmail, Purelymail, Outlook.com (though the spam filtering is unreliable), DuckDuckGo (email aliases and forwarding), iCloud, Onmail, Vivaldi

Unreliable:
Fastmail and POBox.com, in both cases I hit problems getting a domain hooked up knocking me out of email at those domains for more than a week, and with poor and slow customer service response. They also seem to have more temporary outages than most.
Skiff-now gone, but some minor glitches that made me wonder what other glitches lurked.
MXRoute-worst cs in the business

Not sure: Many I have tried briefly, but not long enough to determine whether or not they were reliable

With my recent testing, this issue for iCloud still exists:
https://www.macworld.com/article/220...le-option.html

I think yours is the nicest Jeff and I am grateful for it :)

I'm genuinely surprise MXroute made to your unreliable list. So far I'm impressed with their support and performance.

Any service that discards some content or diverts it to some folder that most users don't read ("Junk mail folder") and doesn't offer users means of overriding this is unreliable by definition. That article used the term "blocks" without defining it: does it mean what "blocking" usually means in precise email terms that is these messages are not delivered at all (what is called "rejected" in Sieve terms), or are they delivered to Apple's system and then are erased instead of being delivered to some location in the user's account (i.e. "discarded") in Sieve terms). If it is being rejected, than the sender knows that the message has not been delivered (but might not have the faintest idea as to why it was not delivered, as that article is describing). If it is discarded then neither the sender nor the recipient has true info about the status of the delivery (the sender gets a confirmation that the message was successfully sent, and the recipient never sees the message).

Since mid 2020 using Hey.com. Can’t hardly remember an outage.

So you want all mail delivered to your inbox including spam, phishing, and messages containing dangerous viruses? Not me. Reliable to me means uptime, speed, deliverability, features working properly like search and storage, perfect functionality between web or desktop and mobile, etc. Many email services fail on the last item in that they don't have a good web interface and a good app that works even when offline. Sure, there are always third party apps one can try, but they are never as good and reliable as using the dedicated app.

Certainly mail to the inbox (I filter most of my incoming mail away from the inbox anyway). But spam filtering should be overridable by filtering rules (and not just for a list of known senders). Fastmail's way of filtering according to your rules, and clearly marking suspected phishing wherever it ended up is better than burying it in a "Junk box". And in many cases when email I sent ends up in the recipient Junk folder, where the recipient never sees it, it would have been better for me if it would have been rejected and I would reliever a non-delivery message immediately.

For my own email I have learned to check the Junk or Spam folder every day because in my experience every email client I have tried puts things there occasionally that shouldn't be there. I would guess I get maybe one or two false positives a month on my Gmail account. To me that's a lot better than getting the many genuine junk and spam messages appearing in my inbox. I found Fastmail and POBox.com among the worst for false positives.

icloud just drop the messages silently, either sent messages or incoming messages.
it's not a reliable option for me.

Is Mail.com just as reliable? I believe I had an account with them a long time ago and dropped it for some reason, but can't remember why. They have a lot of domains to choose from, which is a nice feature.

Well, I decided to try out a free account on mail.com. Was able to sign up with a nice email address on one of their domains, but then got stuck at the required cell phone verification code. Never received a code, and now I am locked out for requesting too many codes (which never arrived). So far my verdict is Not Reliable!

Mail.com sucks, don’t use it.

Doesn't GMX.net own mail.com?