I used to have Verizon email for my personal email, which became AOL mail (which I hate, but didn't want to have to change my email addresses), and now today my AOL email (now called Oath email) asked me to agree to a new privacy policy giving them permission to SCAN my emails for information they can use to tailor ads, etc. As far as I can tell I can opt out of some targeted advertising but cannot opt-out of email scanning - including, and they state this explicitly, info from financial institutions. I think I need a new email provider. I don't mind paying a monthly fee. Questions: 1) My work email is an Outlook server, and is not private, we sign an agreement that the office can monitor it. I like the Outlook interface and might want to use Outlook as my provider, but want to keep it totally separate from work email. Can Outlook handle that? Does it have an internet based portal so I can check personal email without my office having access? 2) What do you think is the best email provider? Looking for a good clean interface (from a Surface computer on Windows 10, an iphone, and also internet portal), no ads, and ability to store email in folders. I don't need massive storage capability. 3) Should I be using encrypted mail? I have only an average need for privacy - nothing special, particularly, but I don't want AOL/Oath scanning my emails to target me for interests, financial bracket, etc. and I do get some email that contains info I don't want mined for their purposes. Nor do I want my friends/contacts email addresses collected and used for mailing lists, something I know gmail does unless you specifically opt out. I appreciate any help and advice...
If you want control of your email you need a domain name, a hosting service and the desire and ability to do it yourself. Use any other email services as a throw away junk addresses that you don't give a shit about.
We technically Microsoft does have an online email service called Outlook.com. So they are kind of both.
It is both, it is an email management application but Microsoft also offers Outlook mail (outlook.com) which looks to me a lot like yahoo.com or gmail. I'm just a little worried that my Outlook application would integrate an outlook email account a little too well and make my personal email accessible to my corporate overlords.
I have a domain name, what hosting service would you recommend? Currently my domain name is hosted by a company owned by the company I work for, so that's not really who I want to use since I am not sure it is not ALSO monitored by the company. :/
Plenty of them out there. I use 1and1 but there are plenty of them out there. I just rent a VPS from then and run my own SMTP host on it. That forwards in to my house via a VPN tunnel to bypass Comcrap outbound port filtering.
I pay Earthlink for email service. Good Spam filtering, and as far as I've been able to determine, no scanning for ad data. You can use the Outlook Mail client or any other mail client with a POP interface.
Thank you, that sounds like a good option. Maybe earthlink can get by for a while before getting bought out by somebody, and just be a provider not an advertising machine like AOL.
I'm kind of amazed there hasn't been more pushback on this company, Oath, since they asking all users of AOL.com (which is a ton of old Verizon email users like me) AND all Yahoo email users to agree to scanning all their email, including photos, financial info, etc. with no way to opt out. Apparently gmail was doing something similar but stopped, in response to complaints and lawsuits... so the Oath agreement also has you agree to binding arbitration so as to avoid those sorts of lawsuits. I don't mind paying for email and I don't mind changing providers - I just hate the hassle factor of a new email address and having to change everything over everywhere.
I'm still paying Earthlink, ever since the dialup days. That gives you up to eight primary email addresses. Then in each account you can get basically an unlimited amount of throwaway 'anonymous' email addresses as you need them. You can access online via webmail or use a client. At home I use Thunderbird.
Simpleton terms....I rent a Virtual Personal Server from them on which I run a Simple Mail Transport Protocol package which receives mail from the outside world, scans and filters anything I don't want to see, sends the rest into a specific IP address which is my internal mail server, that once again filters to get rid of anything that slipped through the outside instance and is the server to which my Outlook clients, Android devices and the wife's iPad connect to send and receive email. All the traffic between my internal server and the external virtual server passes over a Virtual Private Network that I control to hide the contents of that traffic from Comcrap.
