Best off-the-beaten-track free email?

[webecedarian]

Any opinions on what are good free email providers other than the most widely used ones (e.g. Gmail, Yahoo, Hotmail, etc.)? It's for situations when I'm at computers that have blocked the mainstream ones. Nothing fancy needed.

[Tsunami]

With the risk of repeating myself again and again: Safe Mail has been doing a perfect job for me and has been doing so for many years now. If storage is no special requirement (or if you are willing to pay for more storage) then I'd definitely recommend them.

Maybe also check ContactOffice.com, their inactivity limits are not very nice but the storage and features you get seem to be very good. So as long as you plan to log in very frequently it may be interesting for you.

I believe Zoho was given a lot of praise too, but I am not sure if they would be classified as "the big ones" and thus be blocked on your work computer?

[King Of Email]

Webecedarian, you might want to try umail.net, a Ukranian based free email service. The site and mailbox is in English. It's fairly plain and uses challenge/acknowledgement features to fight spam. I found it on a Bing search about 100 pages deep. I couldn't get my first name which is very common, but my last name was available. It's quick and handy and I use it for personal use. Here's the link: https://umail.net/

[janusz]

Originally Posted by King Of Email

uses challenge/acknowledgement features

This may be a bonus or b**** nuissance...
And one more point: If this sentence from their T&C is correct

E-mail messages, contacts and any other information stored in user accounts can not be read and/or copied neither by service personnel nor by any other persons or companies

it means there is no backup

[janusz]

... and there is no POP3, IMAP or SMTP (which may or may not matter)

[drew]

Seems to be a DEA? or what is the official term for such a service.

Why Umail rocks?
... Instead of using single e-mail address
for different resources you can create many aliases
of your main account - for each used resource separately.

All messages sent to these disposable email addresses
will be collected in your main Umail inbox but you can
easily remove such address and create another one
if it have been compromised and you get too many spam
to this e-mail.

Other Umail features:

All usual webmail functionality (compose, receive, reply, forward, etc);
Reliable protection from spam;
One-click creation of disposable address;
Tags for better organization;
A lot of space for message archive;

Would it not mean that many services would put them on the list
of being a DEA? Disposable Email Address?

Does not many sites and forums ask for a "real" email address?

But thanks to the King for telling about it. the domain is really nice.

Here is another description on how to use it.
http://articles-book.com/Article/Use...ptions-/237125

My pessimism tells me that those that wants our email addresses have lists
on DEA and thus one can not use this one or any of the others for long?

But I hope I am wrong. If any of you are motivated why not test and see what happens.

But it is no regular email service is it?

[Dutchie007]

Regarding Umail.(I just signed up)..I can´t see the attachments in my inbox. What Am I doing wrong? Anyone else has this?
For the rest the service looks nice and clean...5 Gig space...So thats OK with me.

Dutchie

[just1acc]

Originally Posted by King Of Email

I found it on a Bing search about 100 pages deep. https://umail.net/

You're the real "King Of Email", 100 pages...wow!

[David]

Originally Posted by just1acc

You're the real "King Of Email", 100 pages...wow!

The 'King' does not post any junk (either) - just good solid content, that has been of use to many, over the years.

[communicant]

I opened an account at umail.net and was able to configure the settings and so forth to my liking, and I sent a successful test message to another account. (For those who like to keep track of such things, be aware that your machine's IP will be displayed in the headers of outgoing mail. For me it's not necessarily a deal-breaker, but on general privacy principles I do prefer services which obscure the actual IP. Identifiers that only convey information to the host service in case of reported abuse are fine, but there is really no need to display an open IP to all recipients, and unfortunately umail.net does do this.)

My only practical problem so far is that messages in the inbox and sent folder do not open when I click on them, at least when using the full-powered interface. I can open messages with no problem by using either of the two mobile interfaces. (Umail.net offers a choice of "simple phone" or "smartphone/tablet," both of which can be used by a non-mobile laptop or desktop as well, and which can be selected from the main interface.) Has anyone else encountered this problem?

By the way, does anyone happen to know the inactivity period for umail.net? There does not seem to be any mention of it in the TOS.

[janusz]

Originally Posted by communicant

My only practical problem so far is that messages in the inbox and sent folder do not open when I click on them, at least when using the full-powered interface.

Works for me (Win7 + FF).

[janusz]

Originally Posted by Dutchie007

5 Gig space...So thats OK with me.

5 GB or more? Umail FAQ says

Mail box size.
All the data in umail.net are stored on special servers called repositories. For the time being, the user's quota (including letters, contacts, temporary addresses etc) is limited only by the size of the repository on which the user's account is stored. Each repository’s total size is nearly 14 terabytes (14,000 gigabytes). Te capacity of a repository is shared between users whose accounts are located on that server. This means that if you are the only user on a server, you can utilize its full capacity.

That's not the only example of various bits of information about umail on their website being inconsistent.

[north]

Originally Posted by communicant

[...]but on general privacy principles I do prefer services which obscure the actual IP. [...]

...what services with the feature mentioned above can you recommend?

[drew]

Communicant much appreciated you told us this.
And that you share your experience.

Originally Posted by north

...what services with the feature mentioned above can you recommend?

Yes I would want to know this too.
AFAIK Fastmail does?

What about yahoo?
They too have DEA Disposable Email Address
http://uk.antispam.yahoo.com/addressguard

AddressGuard i... lets you create a "disposable address"
to provide to web sites you don't trust.
So save your main Yahoo! Mail address for emailing friends,
family, and people you know. Create a disposable address
for things like selling a car online, registering for a trip to
Bermuda, buying golf shoes, etc. When that disposable address
starts to get spammed, delete it.
AddressGuard is included in Yahoo! Mail for free.

[communicant]

Originally Posted by north

...what services with the feature mentioned above can you recommend?

Openmail.cc has (all too soon the past tense will be required, alas) very clean headers from a privacy point of view -- short and sweet and containing not a single piece of extraneous information. That is one reason I was so fond of the service, but as you probably know, Ian Armstrong has just announced this week that he is shutting the service down as of March 1, 2013, unless someone can be found to take it over free of charge. (If you know anyone qualified to do this who might be interested, please tell him to get in touch with Ian at once!)

Rick Romero's VFEmail.net hides the outgoing IP for all paid levels, but not for free accounts.

Oddly, Gmail, which is not exactly an exemplar of privacy in practically every other way, does not display the IP in outgoing mail sent from their webmail interface, though I believe the IP does appear in messages sent from a client. There are many such anomalies. Sometimes a service displays the IP when a message is sent in a certain way but not when sent in other ways.

Also, some services that offer more than one webmail interface display the IP in messages sent from one interface but not from another. A perfect example is Eumx.net, which offers a choice of four different webmail interfaces each time you log in. Messages sent from Eumx webmail using the Squirrelmail interface include the IP in headers, whereas messages using the OpenWebMail default interface do not. I don't remember offhand what happens if you use their Horde or Roundcube interface.

There are several other services that routinely don't display the IP even for free accounts, but they usually don't make it a selling point. Vmail.me does make it a point to brag that they don't display the IP, but the service is so screwed up in other ways that I can't recommend them.

If you find a free service you want to try, sign up for it, send yourself a test message at another account and check the headers. They vary considerably in how much information they convey. The only way to know in most cases is to try a service and see for yourself. And if you choose a webmail service with more than one interface, be sure to send messages from each interface and compare the headers, because they may very well differ in several respects.