Thanks Mick (and Paul and Martin) for suggestions. Mick: I'm with you on your various points -- see below.
On 04-Sep-10 19:50:02, mick wrote:
On Sat, 04 Sep 2010 18:41:55 +0100 (BST) (Ted Harding) Ted.Harding@manchester.ac.uk allegedly wrote:
I'm therefore asking if poeple can recommend a provider of email hosting on which I could have an account with IMAP access. I would want this to be of high quality and reliability and capable of handling high levels of incoming traffic (for various reasons, I can get up to 500 emails a day -- most of which I delete on the basis of the Subject alone, some others after a quick look at content, leaving typically some 5-10% to download; so I need to be able to do this quickly).
Ted
I tend to agree with Martin's (rather terse) response.
I run my own mail server (but I prefer postfix to exim) with dovecot for pop/imap access (no squirelmail because I think webmail is an abomination). I run this on a VPS at bytemark. They aren't the cheapest VPS provider around, but others on this list use them and can probably confirm that they are good guys.
I don't want to run my own mailserver (except perhaps experimentally, but I would be "down" from time to time; and in any case I don't have time in the present circumstances to experiment).
I used 1and1 for my mail for many years and whilst they are OK, I have had several arguments with them about domain management and I am in the process of moving even that away from them.
My only clear recommendation would be to avoid at all costs any "free" email providers (google, MS, yahoo etc). Whilst they may at first sight appear attractive, you have no contractual rights to the service. Worse, in some cases such as google, the bastards scan your email in order to profile you.
Absolutely! In addition, in the case of one mailing list I have a lot to do with (r-help@r-project.org), their server runs spam checks which (for fairly sound reasons) are sensitive to the presence of "gmail.com" anywhere in the headers; such mail may then be held for moderation before going out to the list. So, if mail were delivered to me via gmail and I replied to it, it would tend to be trapped.
If you don't want the hassle of running your own mail server, I'd suggest you look to pay for a service in the £10-£20 per year range. That should give you at least a dozen mailboxes and around a gig of store with pop and imap access.
That is exactly the sort of thing I am looking for, and would welcome recommendations!
Thanks, Ted.
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