Best email provider for avoiding 'junk'?

[Craig_J]

Because I have nothing better to do on my day off work then wait for a Sky TV repairman to come round tomorrow I am sat here at 3.55 in the morning clearing out my emails. I've been saying to myself for a long time that I'd get it sorted and looking at the last page it appears I've been saying that since the 12th of February 2010...

In that time I've had thousands of emails from various PPi, legal protection and of course credit card companies. (Black Diamond and Aqua being the main culrpits so I've now sworn to never get a card from them) I can't delete them all at once nor block them as they use hundreds of different addresses so I'm down to deleting most of the 14,000 one by one...

I've heard of certain sites that prevent your address from being leaked and can tell you where to source of the leak is. Anyone have experience with this? Will save me a lot of time in future!

 

[Whiffler]

Can't answer on leak-tracing, but before getting a personal email rather than operating through work, I was very wary.

I went for Yahoo.com which gives you two usernames, one the name of the account - the other you choose.

I made sure that neither username had anything like a forename or surname, as I always suspected that these could be combined automatically to generate username-related spam.

I get maybe one spam a week, and most of them are filtered into a spam folder along with the occasional legit email that somehow falls foul of their spam algorithm.

And all free.

Occasionally I find that an email hasn't shown up at all. Of course, there might be masses of these, but I'm sure if it was a big issue I'd know.

 

[Notmegov]

I have 2 email addresses, one i use for signing up to sites and forums (and any thing remotely dodgy) and the other is for personal,work,finance etc.

Thats with Gmail, have had my ligit one now for almost 8 years and get a few spams emails a day that 99% of the time get caught and thrown in the spam folder.

As for the other email address it gets about 40 emails a day from various sites (twitter, eBay, fb, ) non of which are of any importance.

 

[Mr_B]

i have gmail, hotmail etc but I also use GMX.com, hardly get any spam in that one, great email system , check it out

 

[Baleforce]

I've been toying with giving this a go, obviously it requires you running your own service as you need to reroute the MX

http://mailroute.net

if you want to just use an existing service then googles is probably the best feature set, most resilient and most effective when it comes to filtering, you get access to a lot on the backend and can configure things to your hearts content, it's free, and, you will know who the leak is, it'll be them ;-)

 

[P.D.]

I use outlook.com for my main one which is pretty good, never get any junk through (gets filtered into junk folder automatically) and has quite a clean UI. Also have a gmail account I use for more general stuff like online orders, forum sign ups etc. Filters the junk well but the UI is a bit clunky I find, prefer outlook.

Also use the outlook email app on the iPhone and that's great at filtering the non essential stuff into an other folder and the main ones from your contacts into the main folder, you can easily transfer them between each other and it learns as you go along. Can also swipe it away so it disappears for a certain amount of hours till you have time to deal with it (you set the time in the settings), worth checking out the relevant apps too as I pretty much only access email on my phone these days.

 

[Raziel]

Yahoo is terrible .. literally a junk destination haven.
Google's only real business is selling your information to advertisers, so figure that one out.

Outlook.com is actually pretty good, add on the newsletter and clutter features, Spam is a bit less painful. Also allows the alias option in addition.
GMX as another poster mentioned is a decent smaller offering.

Best practice is also described above

- One main account, keep stuff you actually do important transactions/notices for here (bank, tax, etc.)
- Second account for newsletters, sign up to websites, social media brick

The other factor is the services you use

- If an android user, google play, then you need a gmail account
- Outlook, office 365, OneDrive, Skype, Xbox, other Microsoft services, you will need an Outlook account

 

[P.D.]

That's not true, you can sign up to a Microsoft account with a gmail email address.

 

[Raziel]

That's not true, you can sign up to a Microsoft account with a gmail email address.

?? not for services .. i.e. Xbox/Skype

 

[Dicko]

Which one is the proper outlook email app.. I'm seeing two?

 

[P.D.]

I would guess Outlook.com but I don't have Android. Can't you read the reviews.

?? not for services .. i.e. Xbox/Skype

Of course you can, check out the bottom of this page http://www.microsoft.com/en-gb/account/default.aspx

You register whatever email address you want as a MS account and then you can sign in to their services with it, obviously it works better with an outlook email address etc so it's all integrated but doesn't matter whether it's gmail or yahoo etc. You also get the free onedrive data storage allowance with it as well for any MS account you set up.