I pay a very small amount to have my own mail server on my own domain. It is unlikely to ever change (great for long-term networking) and I control exactly how crappy or excellent the service is.
Considering how important email is to each of us in our daily lives, even non-hackers, I'm surprised more people don't pay for it.
- You can't. - You can, if you use a native client through IMAP. Both Mail.app in OS X and Thunderbird work very well.
There are some open source projects out there that try to do a good webmail interface. It's been over a year since I last scoped out that scene, but there wasn't much stable, mature stuff back then.
This setup gives me the best web mail client without vendor lock in, I can switch to my own server any time I want and keep all email addresses.
GMail just pips Yahoo to the top, both making up about 1 in 3 users each.
Hotmail seems to just magically disappear e-mails at random; they never end up arriving with our customers. Yahoo frequently “defer” delivery until later which can be very annoying when sending out verification e-mails. We’ve never had any problems with GMail delivery at all.
Following the advice on the pages below has helped resolve some of these issues, but if I were a user of these services I’d rather receive the odd spam e-mail or it end up in the junk folder instead of having to wonder if e-mails were occasionally going missing.
http://help.yahoo.com/l/us/yahoo/mail/postmaster/basics/post...
