I’ve been a subscriber to POBOX.COM for many years now. It has solved many email headaches and is a great service that deserves some pro bono praise. So click more for the praise (and obviously, I’ve got no financial connection (except my annual bill) to this great company at all).
The primary aim of POBOX.COM is mail forwarding. You sign up for an address (it gives you five aliases with any account), and it then forwards mail to that address to any number of mail servers. So, when you send mail to [email protected], it gets routed to two separate email accounts.
I originally wanted this facility because I wanted to be able to redirect my mail to a local server. That’s become less important over time. More important now is simply the ability to echo mail. All my mail goes to two separate servers. I use one as my primary server, and one as my backup. The backup is a webmail service, so it is easy to get access to mail on the road.
The key benefit to this is that always, inevitably, one server is down at a critical moment, and I can bounce to the second if I need to. (I use AT&T as my primary email account, mainly because of the international dialing numbers. It has this annoying flaw, however, that if you get dumped from the line midway through downloading mail, it can remain “busy” for up to 10 minutes. I’d be eager to discover a replacement with an equally broad international dialup network.)
The one hassle to the email backup system is that sometimes the backup account gets full, and it can be a hassle to go through erasing all the emails on the account. But here’s where a classically-internet story comes in: I sent an email to the developer of a program called PopMonitor, asking whether he knew of a utility that could quickly delete the contents of a mailbox. PopMonitor allows you to do that, but only after downloading all the headers. In the spirit of the internet, this good soul from the Netherlands wrote such a program (called MailTrasher), and gives it away for free. So now, every week or so, it takes a second or so to trash my backup mail account.
POBOX.COM has been a great company. It provides lots of other services (like spam and email filtering), and has been extremely fast in responding to technical problems. Highly recommended for anyone who either (1) can’t keep a job, (2) is running from the law, or (3) needs the reliability of multiple systems to store and access his or her email.
on international dialups…
I use GRIC (Global Roaming Internet Connection) in conjunction with Mindspring (now Earthlink). You can make local connections most places overseas. I have used it in China, India and the UK so I know it works well. Check it out.
http://www.gric.com in case the embedded link doesn’t work.
Regards, Bob
After I’d had personal Internet access for a couple of years, I realized that I would probably have an online identity for the rest of my life. I may be more or less active online, but I would always have an email address.
I have been active in many web discussion forums, mailing lists, newsgroups, etc over the years. I have written software and scripts that occasionally generate feedback. I run a website that has sent my email address to thousands of people over time. For me, the hassle involved in changing email address is unacceptable. The group of people I communicate with is much larger than my friends and family. I knew I needed a permanent email address.
For US$15/year, pobox provides that permanent address without tying me to a particular ISP, or to an advertising-driven webmail service.
I can still choose to forward my mail to a webmail service if I like, and I have done so on occasion. But I like to download and read mail on my own machine. I have a well-developed set of mail filters and supporting spam-elimination scripts that make it easy for me to handle lots of mail. A service like pobox gives me the flexibility I need to efficiently handle large volumes of mail, using a permanent email address, without tying me to an ISP.
I also have a personal web site that has a permanent URL, thanks to the URL redirection service included with my pobox account.
The last time I renewed my pobox account I paid for 5 years and got the 6th year free. I recommend pobox to anyone who would like to have a permanent email address without being tied to a particular ISP.
Until AT&T acquired it and ruined it (IMO), IBM.net was the best ISP I had ever run into. Excellent, very helpful service even if you called them at 2 or 3 AM, good dialup number coverage of USA & International locations, etc.
I would guess that AT&T’s global dialup numbers are probably the ones that IBM had before the acquisition.
I’ve been a pobox.com customer for several years as well (I use their associated domain onepost.net) and am considering renewing, but there’s one thing I have a concern about: their spam filters aren’t very good. I tend to get a LOT of spam and, even worse, there are people out there spoofing my e-mail address which means I sometimes get bouncebacks on e-mails I never even sent in the first place.
What are they doing to prevent spoofing and improve their spam filters?