[LIT] email suggestions

[Keith Mack]

Sorry for cross posting on this.

I run several list serves for educational clients. My current recommendation
for free email is GMail (seems to be the best for both sending and receiving
email). 

Please note that while a free account may essentially get rid of spam, it
may also be getting rid of legitimate email that you want to receive. There
is a server that scores email, not a real person. So when email to you goes
above some random number it is deleted as spam and you NEVER see it. 

Of the email providers that are on my lists, Yahoo and AOL seem to provide
the most problems (Yahoo has recently overtaken AOL in my view). List email
is sometimes blocked at Yahoo and AOL for a number of reasons. In addition
to NOT receiving email from a list, this also creates huge backups on list
mail queues (messages are delayed for hours). As for Yahoo, they put a
little advertisement on the footer of EVERY message. Spam filters will
sometimes detect this and label the email as spam ("lower your mortgage",
"get a new car", etc). So now YOUR messages don't get accepted. Remember the
old adage "nothing is free". 

I don't want to necessarily discourage the use AOL or Yahoo or other free
providers as I know they work well for millions of users. I *do* want you to
be aware that in their zealous approach to "protecting" their users from
spam, they also cause problems for those of us trying to send out
legitimate, requested messages to email accounts on their domains -
sometimes to the point where I've considered not allowing people on lists I
host to use accounts from some of these providers.

So from my perspective, my first choice would be for people NOT to use free
email providers. There are hidden costs and perhaps even hidden agendas from
these providers. Buyer...err...consumer beware.

Keith Mack
kmack at literacyworkshop.org
http://www.literacyworkshop.org

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Shameless Self-Promotion Follows - read at your own risk:

We are offering email accounts on The Literacy Workshop with a $15 donor
contribution (per year, about $1 per month) to our website
http://www.literacyworkshop.org/toolpurchase.htm. So you'd get a more (ahem)
legitimate email presence yourname at literacyworkshop.org when compared to
yourname54kazoo4me at yahoo.com.