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Welcome to EMD!
I've been using Polarismail as my secondary e-mail for a few months now. So far, they've been very stable. Their servers are also very fast, although that might be because I live only a couple of hours away from their Montreal datacenter.
I don't know anything about syncing contacts, so I'll skip that question.
If you use an e-mail client like Thunderbird, Polarismail allows you to put whatever you want in the sender's address. The basic webmail interface (Atmail) doesn't support alternate personalities, but the enhanced interface does. Even if you use basic, Polarismail offers open-source webmails like Roundcube which supports personalities. So as long as you don't have a strong preference for Atmail, you'll be able to customize the sender's address. (But your choice of webmail might affect your ability to sync your contacts.)
It's important to notice that your e-mail will go through Polarismail's servers and not through your university's servers. (Unlike Gmail and Fastmail, Polarismail doesn't seem to support relaying your mail through another SMTP server.) So your messages might end up in your recipient's spam folder. Depending on how strict your university's SPF policy is, your messages might even get outright rejected. So I'd advise that you use your university's SMTP servers whenever possible. I have configured Thunderbird "identities" so that whenever I send from my university address, it automatically uses the right SMTP servers.
I think the phone number is for billing purposes. When was the last time you bought anything online without giving up your phone number? Anyway, once you sign up, your contact info won't even appear in the control panel. I have no idea whether Polarismail even keeps this info. (A little off-topic, but the same is true for the e-mail address you use when you sign up for the 30-day trial. Common sense says that the same e-mail address should be usable as a password recovery method, but there's no such option anywhere in the control panel. I guess I'll have to contact @George_B if I ever changed my contact info or backup e-mail address.)
The privacy policy you quoted seems to be an attempt by Polarismail to cover their a$$ in case one of their "co-branded" resellers does something fishy. The overall impression I get from Polarismail is that they are very much focused on B2B and not so much on B2C, in other words, most of their sales seems to be through resellers and corporate customers, not individual users. (Lack of automated billing and password recovery? Probably because that's the reseller's job.) As far as I'm aware of, there's no third-party tracking code on their website other than the live chat script.
Hope this is helpful,
K
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