What for-pay email providers do you recommend?

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Summary: People often use free email providers for critical data only to lose everything when a problem occurs. So what do you look for in an email provider?

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A fair question. There are many approaches that I do recommend, depending on your specific situation.

I need to explain what I'm looking for, first. Then it's just possible we'll find that you already have what you need.

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I look for three things in an email provider:

1. Portability - can I take my data to a another provider if I so choose?
2. Reliability - can I connect, and does it work consistently?
3. Support - if I have a problem, is there someone to help me?

Most of the free services fail on all three counts.

Portability is probably the most commonly undervalued, and in my mind, the most important of the three. To me, portability means using a desktop mail client like Outlook, Outlook Express, Thunderbird or others. This allows me to download my mail and use a contact list that I control and maintain on my machine. This allows me to control how I backup my mail and contacts, and even allows me to switch to another provider in the future should I want to.

In a nutshell that means my email provider must provide SMTP and POP3 (or IMAP) access to my email. Services that maintain my information only on their servers and are only accessible via their web interface are unacceptable.

Reliability is fairly obvious to most folks. What good is an email provider if they don't work? This includes not only connectivity, being able to even connect to your email provider, but deliverability as well. If your email provider is preventing you from receiving the email you requested, for example, due to over aggressive spam filtering, that could quickly also become unacceptable.

Support is probably the biggest issue I have with many of the free providers, but it holds for paid providers as well. If I have a problem, will you help me? Can I find a person to address my issue? Tied in with reliability, this means helping me with connectivity issues that might come up, account recovery perhaps, and of course, dealing with issues related to missing email and spam.

There's a boatload of other "features" one might consider, including a web interface, customizable spam filtering, mobile access, high mailbox quotas, sub accounts, and so on. To me, these all pale in comparison to the Top Three: portability, reliability and support.

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OK, so what email providers do I recommend?

For the average user, I would start with your ISP. You're already paying someone to connect you to the internet, and by definition they have customer service. (Whether it's good or not is something you'll have to evaluate - and if unacceptable, let them know, and then switch ISPs.)

Most ISPs include at least one, if not several, email accounts with your connectivity package, and they're almost always SMTP/POP3 accounts, and often already include some kind of web interface as well.

If you need more accounts quite often your ISP will provide them for a small additional charge.

In probably about 95% of the situations I hear of here at Ask Leo!, I'd advise first looking to your ISP.

If for some reason you can't use your ISP, then there are many companies that do provide email hosting. A Google search on "email hosting" turns up many providers, typically targeting the small business market. I expect folks with more direct experience with some providers to post a comment on this article with their thoughts.

Many domain registrars also provide email hosting services. For example GoDaddy has several plans, and might be one of the first places I would recommend looking into should you want to go this route.

If you are a small business, or even a medium business, I strongly recommend you a) purchase your own domain name, and then b) use the services of your registrar to establish email accounts (again, via POP3 and SMTP using your desktop mail client) on that domain. That way, even if you change everything else, as long as you own that domain name, the email addresses on that domain need never change.

Finally, one of the alternatives that meets most of my criteria is free, and that's GMail. GMail's a valid alternative, if you use it properly.

What do I mean by properly? Only two things, actually:

• Use GMail's POP3/SMTP interface and use it with your desktop email client. Only use the web interface as a convenience - perhaps when traveling.

• Along those same lines, don't create or rely on contact information in GMail's web interface. Use the contact/address book functionality of your email client.

The primary criteria that GMail doesn't meet is support. Not to say that it isn't there - it is, in the form of an extensive FAQ and user support forum. But you won't easily find a phone number, and it's unclear just how responsive their on-line support request form will be when you finally do find it. Remember - it's free, and you're getting what you pay for.

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In all cases, be it your ISP, an email provider, a domain registrar or even when using GMail "properly" you are taking responsibility for your email. First and foremost that means you need to be backing up your email and contacts regularly in case of loss. One might think that the free and on-line services would do this for you, but based on what I see here every day, that's not turning out to be the case.

Related:

• Ask Leo! - Are free email services worth it?

• Ask Leo! - Choosing an ISP: How do I choose a good ISP?

• Ask Leo! - Is there a way to keep my email address when I change my ISP?

• Google - GMail

• GoDaddy - Email Services

Article C2824 - October 30, 2006