Which email service should I use? Hi, everyone. Leo
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Let's dive right into the question. "I'm wanting to create
and use a new Email account to be used primarily as an address
for maintaining professional connections after I retire from
my current job. Ideally, the new email will be independent of
an internet service provider and as much as reasonably
possible, secure and respectful of privacy. Many people these
days use Gmail. I am considering an Outlook.com
address. My question, do you have any advice and or any
factors I may wanna consider when choosing and setting up
this Email account slash service?" Indeed, I do. When it
comes to Email, I have lots of opinions. I'm going to outline
three specific approaches you can take. So, the criteria that
I want you to consider and that you've mentioned include, what
kind of support will be there if you run into trouble? What
kind of privacy will be offered? What's the cost? And
how long will it be available? All of those need to factor
into the decision. Naturally, not choosing your ISP is a very
good choice. I've definitely run into very concerned
individuals who when they've moved, for example, to a new
neighborhood and their ISP that they had at the old
neighborhood is no longer available at their new
neighborhood, their Email address is gone. There are
usually no solutions that provide them a way to keep the
old Email address at the old ISP and then, when they move
out of range or out of that ISP's service area. So, good on
you for recognizing that and making sure not to use the
Email address provided by your ISP. Now, the most flexible
solution, the one that will last the longest and the one
that I personally happen to use is to own your own domain. Like
I own Askleo.com. As long as I continue to own Askleo.com
every Email address on that domain is under my
control. Now, when it comes to actually implementing the
sending and the receiving and the processing of Email, you
have lots of choices You can, well, at one extreme, you can
set up your own mail server. That's probably not something
most people wanna consider. More commonly, the registrar
from which you purchase the domain may offer Email services
right then and there. Usually for an extra fee but that way,
your Email address at your own domain is yours to do with what
you will and the Email will be processed by that third party,
by your registrar. As long as you keep the ownership up to
date. As long as you continue to renew your ownership of that
domain, that Email address or all of the Email addresses are
yours for life effectively. That is one approach. Indeed,
it costs money. You end up registering your domain which
costs some number of dollars a year and you may end up paying
for some Email service on top of that. There's an approach
and again, it's the approach that I actually use is to route
the Email through a third-party Email processor that offers it
for free. Free sounds a lot like Gmail and indeed, when you
send Email to Leo at Ask Leo dot com, it's actually Gmail at
the back end that's processing the Email for me for free. When
I send Email that's coming from Leo at Ask Leo dot com, it's
being sent through a Gmail account. For the most part, you
wouldn't know to look at it unless you knew to look at some
of the hidden headers and it's great that they're there but
the point is that I didn't have to do anything. I'm doing all
of this through my Gmail web interface. Now, The reason that
I really really like this approach is that again, I own
the domain. I can change any of this at a moment's notice if
for some reason I lost my Gmail account. I would lose all
access to my Gmail Email address. But at the domain
level, the Ask Leo.com level, I could quickly say, oh, let's
start processing my Email using Outlook.com instead of
Gmail.com and I'd be back in business almost in the
Immediately or I could say, you know what? This Gmail thing was
working out great but now it's time to take it back to the
registrar and have somebody with some support, give me help
managing my Email. So, that's my number one recommendation
for most that if you have the ability, if you have the
interest, and if you've got a little bit of of technical
ability, actually owning your own domain is the most robust
solution that gives you the most control for the longest
time. Now, the next solution down are what I would call paid
Email services. There are a lot of them out there. I prefer
paid Email services for anything that's super important
because you have somebody to go to. You have help. The Email
service that I actually have used and continue to use and
pay for is Proton Mail. Now, Proton Mail expertise is not
really focused on providing paid Email. Their claim to fame
is all about privacy and encryption. Two things that you
mentioned were important to you. They are based in
Switzerland. They have a free service that you can use to try
it out. It has some limitations on the amount of Email you can
send and the amount of Email that you can save but it'll
give you a feel for the service and whether or not it's right
for you. If you then want to, you can pay to get more
service, better support, and have those limitations lifted.
As a kind of a combination of what I've talked about so far,
I have another domain on which I have another Email address
but I have it processed by Proton Mail. That is one of the
options for paying customers. Just like I could have ask Leo
dot com's Email processed by Gmail dot com. I have this
other domain being processed by Proton Mail. I log in to my
proton mail account and Email received four and by that
account are all handled by Proton Mail. They also have
some additional privacy-centric services like a VPN and a cloud
storage but for paid Email services, that's typically
where I'm sending people these days. There are many others and
if Proton Mail is not for you, I would encourage you to look
around some. And of course, there's free Email. The huge,
huge catch with free Email services and this goes for both
Gmail and for Look.com is that there is little to no support.
It looks like they're going to be around for a while. I'm not
really worried about losing an Email address anymore if I've
got an Email address on either of those two services. Let's
face it. I've got a twenty or 25 year old hot mail Email
address that is still working and still being serviced by
Outlook.com. The big issue is the lack of support. If
something happens on that account, if something happens,
I lose the account, it gets hacked or whatever, I've no one
to turn to. That's a problem in my opinion but it's a problem
that many people are willing to live with and protect
themselves by making sure to do security correctly on those
accounts and to back up the contents of those Email
accounts on an ongoing basis. That's totally free. Those are
two services that yeah, I'd consider. I would consider
Gmail probably first mostly because Gmail's spam filter
seems to be the best in the industry today and has been for
some time. Outlook, I know they're working on it but it
still isn't up to par. They, it's a fine Email service. If
you don't mind things changing a fair amount, and of course,
if you have a Windows ten PC and are using a Microsoft
account to log into that PC, you already have an Outlook.com
account because that's what it is. Regardless of which
solution you end up choosing, I have to reiterate the
importance of backing up your Email. So many people don't and
so many people are sorry when something happens. Be it an
account hack, a service that disappears, or something else
like simply deleting an Email you didn't mean to delete.
Backing up your Email on a regular basis is in my opinion,
critical for a service that we all rely on so heavily. If
you'd like more information like this along these lines,
consider subscribing to Confident Computing, my weekly
Email newsletter that comes out and covers topics like this,
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Computing. I hope this was helpful. For updates, for
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I'm Leo Nottenboom. This is Askleo.com.
Thanks for watching.