Looking for a new email
 

I've been using gmail but I'm not too pleased with the direction they've moved in. What I'm looking for is:

- Reliability (gmail is sometimes inaccesible for long periods of time)

- The ability to filter mail IN, as opposed to out. In other words, I have a list of email addressed. Anything not coming from those addresses gets zapped.

Any ideas?

Wherever you end up, you should make sure they have [email protected] available as an addy.

:D

Sent you a PM, ST. Cronin.

bumping this in case anybody else has an idea

I still think gmail is by far the best e-mail out there. I have not had the down time problems and you can filter e-mail coming in.

I was thinking the exact same thing when I read the first post. No downtime here, or hardly ever, and I do filter quite a bit...

Good luck with the search anyway.

FM

Occasionally, I will get a message saying the service is unavailable, but that seems to last at most for 2 or 3 minutes. Overall I'm much happier with Gmail than any free service I've used in the past.

I don't think you can filter the way I want to, though, which is: I give gmail a list of email addresses. ONLY mail coming from those addresses gets through.

If you can do that with gmail, somebody tell me how.

If you report mail from the addresses not on your list as spam, it will automatically go into the spam box...but that is the only way I know of to accomplish what you want.

I know you can do that, but that's not at all what I'm talking about. You're describing a 'spam list,' which pretty much every email service has - I want a list, and anything not on the list treated as spam.

by the way, I haven't been able to access gmail all day

maybe you could set a filter that automatically archives every email from your list of known email addresses. Then, anything left in the inbox is actually unwanted stuff. Select all, delete...

FM

that is very odd, I've had absolutely no problems accessing it today, or any other day for that matter...

FM

That's an interesting idea. When I get back into gmail I'll look into that. Still not quite what I want. Is there any reason why an email service COULDN'T provide the filter I'm describing? It's a suggestion I've made many times to different folks, and everybody's more or less laughed, without telling if or why it's impossible.

another way I'd see to make this is to use the star system. Again, set a filter to "star" every email coming from a known email addy and then select unstarred, delete. That way, everything would stay in the inbox.

FM

That's exactly what I do now. It's not particularly inconvenient, but it's not at all satisfactory to me.

I don't know what the deal is with you for gmail... I have NEVER had a downtime of more than 5 minutes and I've been a member since it first started... and I am logged in and at the computer all day..

As for the filtering you want, that exact feature is definately possible in Outlook, etc.. but I've never heard of it in webmail.. I think your best bet in the meantime would be what others have suggested, filter those e-mail addresses to a seperate group and that actually becomes the e-mail you want whereas your inbox is for all of the other junk... not quite as clean as what you want, but I don't think you're going to get what you want from any webmail service.

No idea. Could it be a regional thing?

I don't know much about this, but could this be a DNS thing? As if you have a trouble finding your way to gmail... Just throwing an idea out there...

FM

I've also had no complaints about gMail -- I haven't seen the downtime that you have, and I've only seen 2 spam messages get through to my inbox ever.

I don't know - afaic remember, it used to happen when I was in Madison .. then it stopped, and recently started up again here in Santa Fe. It happens at home, at work, and at school, so I don't think it's a problem on my end.

Most of the time, I can just access it 10 minutes later, but occasionally (like today) it's out for a long period of time.

The reason that you won't see free email implement that filter is that they maintain lists of approved vendors whose emails are allowed through the spam filters.

FWIW, I think I ended up checking my account today more than I ever have in one day, and had no problems logging on.

When you say you can't get to it... do you get a page cannot be found or do you get their little "sorry our server is down, we're cleaning it as quickly as possible" or whatever message?

The message I usually get says something like "Sorry, GMail is not available right now. Try back in a few minutes."

Also on my google home page there will be a message saying GMail is down (so don't bother checking it).

I know earthlink has filters like you describe because someone I had to go through the process of getting her to approve me even though I was replying to her message. I don't know, however, if earthlink has email for non-ISP customers.

edit: Now that I think about it, I think Hotmail has this ability. I use hotmail as my junkmail account, but I seem to remember they have a setting in their junkmail settings that only allows email from known users.