On Thu, 11 Sep 2008 19:51:21 -0500 Dale <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: Hi Dale,
> After getting things switched over, I hope this will make things > easier in the future if I need to switch ISPs or something. My > questions are: 1: Does anyone know of a reasonably priced dial-up ISP > that does not have a monthly limit? Does anyone see anything > wrong/weird with my plan? Maybe something I need to add in? I tried both AOL and GMail and both annoy me to some extend. They both provide free IMAP access, and work "fairly well". I always felt the AOL servers to be pretty slow (when using imap), and i hate the way googlemail saves your E-Mail thrice in it's own, duplicate folder structure (which doubles or triples the size of your local imap cache). This might be reasonable for people accessing the service only through their webinterface, but is annoying when using an external client. The thing that most irritated me after a while are the free provider's privacy terms. Google may archive and index *all* your mail (read: SPAM, everything) for eternity. AIM (as well as google) claims all content to be submitted via their services as their intellectual property (this counts for ICQ also, btw, use jabber!). This is laughable from a juristic point of view, but i find the attempt in itself reason enough not to use their services. There was this funny article linked on slashdot last week (http://valleywag.com/5044902/the-5-most-laughable-terms-of-service-on-the-net). I don't know about Yahoo! specifically in this respect, but I don't expect them to be any better. After some search i stumbled upon the relatively new freemail provider Lavabit (http://lavabit.com). Their service is very promising, privacy is most important. Connections to their server exclusively use authenticated SMTP and they offer pop3 and imap over SSL. There are free, free with ads, and two paid ($6 or $18 p. year) service models, each with their own limits. Most important for me was their free IMAP support. You might want to check out their page wether it suits you. I am very content with their service, even if you don't get an unlimited storage space at their servers. Google does this because they can afford it (wasting our precious resources) and in turn mines all that data for personalized ads, search, and whatnot. Regards, Patric
