Y'all,

I am looking to transition my personal email off of Gmail and wonder if you can recommend a provider. What I would like is:

- not too expensive
- reasonable spam filtering
- ssl/tls
- web interface

Throw-away email addresses would be a big plus. I started looking at legacy providers like NetZero, but then realized I should ask the experts.

Thoughts?

out of curiosity, what's your beef with Gmail?

Agreed. I use GMail for my business without any problems. When I grow I'll just transition to Google Apps.

I used Google apps, and it works beautifully - their spam filtering is second to none, and I have the family's email, my business page and various other functions through it.

Pretty cheap - 3 or 4 quid a user or something.

Google's spam filtering is excellent, although I get a lot of mail that is intended for other people by my name (I imagine these folks going "Hmmm, is Jim on Hotmail or AOL or GMail?")

However, my number one issue is a growing unease with having the content of my "personal" email mined to power targeted advertising. I half expect if I were to mention something like "terrorism" in an email that I would start seeing adverts in GMail for fertilizer.

You mean you actually look at the advertising? I guess someone must, since el goog is making plenty of money. I've kinda trained myself to not even see it. Kinda like filtering out noise.

I think what Jim is concerned about isn't the advertising, but the fact that his emails are being perused in order to generate it. Yes, Google claims that no human is seeing it, only machines, but still...

tanstaafl.