Replacement for Gmail- any ideas?

Hello there,
I've been using gmail now for a few years but I want to get out of 'Googleworld' completely as I find their general intrusivness scary, plus they have the least intuitive interface I've ever come across- it makes my old Outlook Express look like a work of genius!
In looking round for an alternative web-based email (I travel alot and need to access it from anywhere, often on shared computers), I've come across one called mail.com but when I try to register, it keeps coming back with "Sorry, we are unable to process your application now. Please try later."
Well I've been trying for three days now, always with the same result. Can anybody out there give me any idea why?
Also, can anybody offer another email for me to try? I don't like hotmail as I harbour a profound dislike of Microsoft, likewise Yahoo and now Google.
What appealed to me about mail.com was that you can choose from a long list of cool mail address endings and they don't seem to suck you in to their empire like google does.....
Thanks for any help in advance.
 

EQ Admin

EQ Forum Admin
Staff member
Hello,

The mail.com is just another free email service that has the same limited support for free accounts types of issues as any other email service provider.

If you don't want to be sucked into a free email service domain name, and don't want the problems that some time arise from traveling, consider registering your own domain name and using the registrars email hosting for your email.

Getting your own domain name will allow you to have your own domain forever, you won't be tied to a particular email service or have to tell people when you change email addresses, and it also means you can change the email service that provides the email hosting with relative ease.

:welcome: to Email Questions!
 
Thank you very much for that interesting idea- it had never occured to me.
In the meantime I also discovered that to use pop3/imap access with mail.com, you need to upgrade from the free service to their premium one, which means that if I wish to link a mail.com account to my outlook mail program, i'm gonna have to pay a fee anyway (although as yet I haven't discovered how much they want to upgrade).
But can you clarify for an idiot such as myself, what this will cost? I followed your link and it appears to me that I would need to pay €7.99 a year for the domain name, plus €2.99 every month to have an email address attached to that (btw I live in Italy).
Have I understood that correctly?
If I have, it seems a little in the steep side as basically it would mean €36 a year for email plus €8 for the domain name, totalling €44 a year or €3.66 a month.
Well, €44 is about $70- and that seems quite alot for just my private email account.....
Have I understood this correctly?
 

EQ Admin

EQ Forum Admin
Staff member
It depends on the registrar, each one will have different service plans.

With Godaddy I pay only the .com domain registration fee and I get 1 free pop account and 100 free forwards with each domain name purchase.

I use Godaddy to host domain based forwards for my domains, and a pop3 account I keep separate from Gmail, and it works fine.

Godaddy also gets a +1 for their excellent customer service.
 
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