Email you send me to my personal addresses (kgs@bluehighways.com and kgs@freerangelibrarian.com ) may be going into the bitbucket. So if I don’t respond, don’t assume I didn’t see it. Post here to the blog or IM me at either of those addresses or freerangelib, or email me at work.
I’ve recently had tussles back and forth with Fastmail, my email provider. The latest is too complicated to go into but involves subdomain mapping which was set up when I established Mailman lists for a couple of purposes and then found I couldn’t post to them from any of my addresses hosted by Fastmail. Back and forth for five days… gruesome.
(There’s also one small list I’m on that blocks me entirely, due to identifying Fastmail as a spam provider. Un-fun, though when that was my only problem, I lived with it.)
I’m now seeing only a fraction of list traffic, and for my personal mail, I have that peculiar feeling that people are responding to email or sending me new messages, and I’m not seeing what they sent me. I’ve repeatedly sent myself email from work and watched it simply vanish into the ether. Doesn’t bounce, doesn’t show up, doesn’t go into the junk mail folder — just never arrives. Sandy sent me something this morning… never appeared… I asked her to resend it… same thing. Didn’t bounce. Not in junk mail. Just vanished.
Dreamhost works fine for hosting, but their email sucks. I’ve been very happy with Fastmail, but it may be time to say goodbye. If you know of a good email provider — intelligent mapping, strong spam support, reasonably priced, does IMAP well, has a good webmail client, supports PDAs and whatnot — I’d be grateful for a referral.
Posted on this day, other years:
- My non-MPOW AIM and Skype: freerangelib - 2006
- South Africa SLIS Follow-up 3: The Presentations - 2006
- Ethics: They're Good - 2005
- The Smooth Jazzmobile - 2004
I don’t need/use half the functions you mention so I’m not sure, but would Gmail work for you? I dislike most webmail but can stand their webmail interface pretty well, and it plays nice with forwarding and retrieval from a desktop mail program.
Wow, you’re only one of two people (plus myself) I know who use Fastmail. I continue to like that service, but don’t require the features you seek. Have you addressed your problems in the Fastmail Forums? Most of the forum participants seem knowledgeable and eager to assist. Anyway, good luck in your search for improved email services.
Ronna, San Jose, CA
I’m sorry to hear about Dreamhost, as some of my hobby stuff is there. My work mail is on Pair.com and they’ve been bulletproof! Also very good at spamtrapping, almost no false positives and very few false negatives (and my domains get about a thousand spams a day).
Dreamhost is better than fine for hosting; they’ve been excellent in that respect, and get better every year. I’ll look at Pair (and *possibly* Gmail…). Thanks!
Have you looked at Horde?
http://www.horde.org/imp/
I know nothing about it, so I guess I’m no help there, but I ran across it today and thought of this post.
I’ve used fastmail in the past but it is not my main eamil account. I’ve never experienced the problems you are having. Gmail is a good account to establish.