Need a Pro/Premium pop email account with advanced features... ASAP!

[CZroe]

I'm loosing stuff left and right, I've lost count of how many email databases I've lost from personal hard drive crashes, I'm hitting ISP storage limits and missing messages, and I'm FLOODED in spam. Email is unusable, and I'm failing class because of it. HEEEELP! Hotmail, Yahoo and all the crap free services are NOT going to cut it for me. I need to be able to have access to thousands of organized emails, and be able to access it from OutlookXP. Remote access from the web that can synchronize with OutlookXP would be a HUGE plus. I'm specifically looking for an email provider that nearly eliminates spam, and one that I know will not be blacklisted or lose messages (Sent or recieved). I'm tired of non-paying bidders on eBay claiming that they emailed me when they didn't, and teachers that never seem to get my work. Now I want to make SURE it's not my ISP of Hotmail's fault. I know Outlook has been the source of much of my current spam (No way to "preview" a message without HTML images downloading and "confirming" your address to spammers; same as replying to spam), but there is no way I'm signing up for another Hotmail account everytime the last one becomes unbearable. I'm looking for a LONG TERM service that can provide all this for cheap, not like a second ISP charge.

Once again, I need:

To be able to access with Outlook, yet have the Outlook database stored locally and remotely in case of local data loss.
To have a LARGE storage limit for such a database.
To have SPAM control, like the McAfee service, but I want a guarantee that only REAL spam is bounced because I don't want to loose a single legitimate message.
To have near 100% uptime for sending and receiving.
The best solution as fast as possible.

Thanks!

 

[joinT]

why not just MOVE all your important real emails into local folders on your computer. you're going to hit a LOT of storage limits if you want to save every email to & from all your professors on the server. the local folders will be stored on your hard drive. you can also manage them better with extra folders, etc. If you're worried about hard drive failure, just copy your .pst file every day to a cdr or zip disk or something.

 

[CZroe]

That's what I currently do, but I have the same problems regardless and I'm SICK of it! My messages have been duplicated so many times from recombineing databases after drive failures that it'll take me a month to delete all the dupes. EVERY TIME before I can get the chance to go through it all I have another drive failure and another old database backup is all I have left. Currently I'm forced to use Outlook Express because it REFUSES to export my old mail and copying the .db files to my OutlookXP machine will cause the "duplicate" problem again. I'm running out of storage limits because of SPAM. I learned a long time ago to use the "leave messages on server" option (Which has saved my ass numerous times), but even when I delete as much spam as possible (It deletes from the server at the same time) it still fills right up after a couple text-only attachments and a day of receiving spam.

 

[sean2002]

Softhome this is what I use, I pay $30 a year anf NEVER get any spam and have high limites on usage

 

[joinT]

Originally posted by: CZroe
That's what I currently do, but like I said I'M SICK OF IT. My messages have been duplicated so many times from recombineing databases after drive failures it'll take me a month to delete all the dupes. EVERY TIME before I can get the chance to go through it all I have another drive failure and another old database backup is all I have left. Currently I'm forced to use Outlook Express because it REFUSES to export my old mail and copying the .db files to my OutlookXP machine will cause the "duplicate" problem again. I'm running out of storage limits because of SPAM. I learned a long time ago to use the "leave messages on server" option (Which has saved my ass numerous times), but even when I delete as much spam as possible (It deletes from the server at the same time) it still fills right up after a couple text-only attachments and a day of receiving spam.

Man, OK - you really need to figure out whose giving you these bad hard drives :Q Sorry from your original post it sounded like you just had to keep every email on the server.
Truthfully, I've never had huge problems with spam in my hotmail. 1-2 a day, tops. Did you make sure to UNcheck the box for listing yourself in the hotmail white pages? Cuz that DEFINITELY leads to a lot of spam.

 

[CZroe]

I have a VERY high understanding of the way automated spammers work, and I would NEVER register in the whitepages, but I can't explain why some Hotmail accounts are unbearable and others not. My brother's, for example, is about like you describe, however my home ISP account and my 5 or so Hotmail accounts recieve over 100 spam messages a day. All of my Hotmail accounts had this problem before sending a single message. I've disabled message previewing at home to stop "verifying" spammers that try random (and alphabetically sequential!) addresses. I can't believe there's no option to disable or prompt for previewing HTML messages with external Internet content, or even a "flag" for HTML content (I've dug through ALL optional columns in Outlook). I've come to the conclusion that I must buy a personal domain name and figure out how to make an email server bounce all messages from anyone that I havn't added to a list, yet provide them to me anyway, no matter what address it was sent to on that domain name (ie, my email would be [ANYTHING]@mydomain.com). This would add additional steps and not be integrated into Outlook (Though someone should have done this by now and offered it as a service!), but I'm willing to test its spam reduction capabilities. Can anyone help a total server newbie do this? All I've done is set up free and XP Pro FTP servers...

 

[ElDonAntonio]

Do as I do:
first, create a hotmail or yahoo account with a completly unpredictable login like asfhui. That'll keep spammers from guessing it and sending you spam. Anyways, use only this account for spam-prone sites that ask for an email adress.

Then for your clean email adress: register a domain name (i like dotster.com), and subscribe to a server (i like pair.com, only 5$/month and top of the line uptime and service, been using them since 3 years).
You'll get whatever@yourdomainname.com. Then pick a main adress like firstname@domain.com, and give it to your friends, family and trusted people. Then when you subscribe to a site like say Dell, give the adress: dell@yourdomain.com. That way, if you ever get a piece of spam, you'll know exactly who sold your adress. You can sue them and block this specific adress.

This strategy is working for me so far, not 1 spam email!!! 🙂 just be careful who you give your adress too and tell your friends not to subscribe you to promotions or stupid things like that.

 

[CZroe]

The problem with Hotmail is that systematically trying every possible address reaps HUGE rewards for spammers due to their large userbase. I can't say how many times I've opened an email and seen in the list of recipients "czroa@hotmail.com, czrob@hotmail.com, czroc@hotmail.com, czroed@hotmail.com, czroe@hotmail.com, czrof@hotmail.com, czrog@hotmail.com, etc..." in the recipients portion, and there's no telling how many others DO IT RIGHT and automate it to do it one at a time. I have no idea how to configure a server the way I described in person or remotely, so I'd rather learn on my own before I pay for hosting and it takes me months to figure out 🙂

Thnx for the idea, I may use it!

 

[bizmark]

couple of suggestions:

1) go through all of your Hotmail spam e-mails, and follow the "remove" instructions from every one of them. I did this recently, and it's amazing what a difference it makes. I hardly use the account at all, so I check it about every 1.5 weeks or so, and before I unsubscribed myself from all that spam, I'd be at the limit each time I'd check. Now I'm always way less than the limit. You've got to do this periodically, but it works. I found that there were 4-5 main spam suppliers where I was getting about 60% of my spam from. You can tell because the spam emails are formatted the same way and they give the same unsubscribe address.

2) buy a server and a domain name, and serve your own email. It's not that hard to do. I've never done it myself, but I have several friends who have done so, using various versions of Linux/FreeBSD.

Also if you get persistent emails with no "unsubscribe" thing, you can look in the email header for the originating hostname. Then send email to abuse@hostname.com and gripe about it. If the spam is about some website, you can send a gripe to abuse@website.com, so if people are sending unauthorized spam emails promoting some website (b/c of referral links or whatever), they can cancel payments to the person who's sending those spams. Threaten to take legal action against the website and/or their ISP. There are usually spoofed addresses in the header, so you've got to work your way down to the real ones. Also there are programs such as SpamAssassin that supposedly work.

 

[CZroe]

You should NEVER reply to spam, not even to unsubscribe. Most unsubscriptions, literally NEARLY EVERY ONE simply use your reply to mean that your account is more active and therefore MORE valuable to them, plus it verifies that your address exists for all the spammers that "discover" it by just trying every possible address at every known domain (Hotmail is their biggest target)! The ones that do not do this nearly always have forged headers with some totally bogus sources (That's why so many spams claim to be from yourself!). EVERY BIT of the header can be forged, and it's not useful in any way for blocking the majority of spam. The forged headers verify the same information by setting up a temporary webserver and configuring it to send the same image no matter what image is requested (You could type in a garbage file name), but log the name of the image that was requested. Then, the "spambots" generate a unique image filename in the url of every spam message sent. The image automatically downloads and previews when you view the message, verifying to them that the account exists, is active, and the user actually reads spam (That makes you a "hot one" that they can sell to other spammers for a premium.). I've seen a hybrid of the two methods also. The majority of unsubscription "links" are also unique. When clicked, it will say that you are unsubscribed and will show your email address. Change a few characters in the URL and you'll see that the page will still load, without error, and will show a different address. This PROVES that they are harvesting emails this way. I've even set up a previously non existing account and changed the url to get the new account's email address displayed, clicked "unsubscribe" and watched identical spam pour in. Email was DESIGNED to be unsecure for trusting communications. Too bad the Internet came along and made it the standard before something managed was invented 🙁