Affordable & Reliable Email Hosting?

sarcast asks: "I am looking for an affordable email-only solution for basically forwarding any emails from a domain name ([e-mail]) to someone's personal email account ([e-mail]). The point being that the person can buy a domain name and then if they decide they want to change ISPs, it is just a simple matter of forwarding to another address. With the recent downturn of some ISPs, people that have had their email address with a certain provider for years, will probably lose them. There are plenty of people out there offering to host my email, but they package it with a website deal which is a waste if all I want is just an email package. Has anyone had good experiences with any company in particular?" This was last asked over a year ago, has there been any new developments on this front?

Namecheap.com

[Dave114]

For something like $8.88/yr you get your domain registration and with it free email forwarding, url forwarding/cloaking, and some basic dns services (A records, CNAMES, etc.).

Professional Associations

[Yuri Gadow]

First, a quick response to the question as stated. I think getting a domain solely for the purpose of one person's email is overkill, not to mention a usage of a limited name-space that carries some debatable ramifications. That said, some other solutions to that problem:

- IEEE and ACM offer email forwarding at no charge to members. The affordability and longevity of this really depend more on you than them (I doubt IEEE is going anywhere.) If you do not wish to become/remain a member for other reasons, the membership fee would be a bit outrageous just for the forwarding. I don't know about the ACM, but IEEE does virus scanning before forwarding - so you don't have to look at all those attachments that couldn't infect Evolution anyway. If you're in a different field, take a look at the relevant professional societies.

- SpamCop has a nice forwarding service that also gives you easier access to the SpamCop features, filtering and a nifty quarantine function.

- Mail.com offers free email accounts, with the usual ten tons of pop-up, blinking, swirling, in-your-face ad mania (all easily disposed of with a recent Mozilla build.) The difference between mail.com and the others is that you can set-up your mail.com account to forward to, for free still, any other account.

- Usermail offer email accounts for a fee, with POP3 access. Unfortunately I have not been able to find a comparable service that offers IMAP and/or SSL or TLS access.

The longevity of the latter three is, of course, debatable. Mail.com makes a nice front-end email address for personal and spam-bait activities (like giving a valid e-mail for an online purchase), while the professional associations make perfect conduits for business/professional (since you will probably change contacts there at the same time you would want to leave an associations.)

You might also check in with your alma mater to see if they have jumped on that bandwagon yet.

As an aside, and I'm sure this is redundant, it would seem that I should really be able to trot down to my local post-office, present some form of ID (such as my Brother Ellison Card) and get a [e-mail] forwarding address.