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thinking about getting a gmail account for new years

furcalchick

furcalchick

macrumors 68020
Original poster
Dec 19, 2006
2,426
5
South Florida
with new years coming up fast and msn hotmail becoming a bit more annoying (too many ads on their site and can't get my mail out of there to my apple mail program), i'm thinking about getting a gmail account (or prehaps a email account from elsewhere *not yahoo or aol, they both suck, especally in the spam department*) and making that my primary email address and having the hotmail account i've had for years become a secondary account. i'm doing this all in a year's time, so that by the end of 2007, all of my relevant email is in the gmail account instead of the hotmail one. and i think seperation from msn will be good for me, as it's just getting worse by the day at microsoft and i have personal issues with the nbc run venture.

so i need some suggestions to what accounts will be good to block spam and to be very compatable with the apple mail app, and how can i get all my stuff to be sent to my new mail account from my old one? and most importanly, is this a good idea to sepereate myself from all things microsoft expect for some im purposes (at least concerning my macbook, not dumping the windows desktop as it is reliable until it dies).
 
Why do you hate aol.com? I never get spam on my AOL account. Plus free 2GB IMAP. GMail is great, too, though. I love it. I have GMail, AOL, Yahoo, and Hotmail all in my Mail.app... I'm trying to get NetZero working, because I signed up for an account long, long ago, but for some reason it and MacFreePOPs don't get along. :(
 
I have two accounts, at Yahoo, and e-garfield.

I've had my e-garfield for a while, and just recently signed up for Yahoo.

I hate Gmail. I ALWAYS got spam when I was with them. Plus, I don't like thier interface.

Yahoo or e-garfield for me.
 
i just thought aol was still spammy from back in the day. guessed they changed. but my hotmail is spewing naughty spam (although it's alot less than it was years ago) and the interface and options have gone down the drain since i signed up back in the late 90's.

but i have a yahoo email account, and i get tons of spam all the time, it's annoying. you know....i'll try to see if my yahoo account gets working in my mail.app, i hardly ever use it, but i may try to see what it can do.

i'll give you an update shortly about the yahoo.
 
The thing is... once you get the spam filter on Mail.app working, which takes days, you get maybe one spam e-mail a day in your inbox, and maybe one legitimate e-mail in your junk mailbox every two weeks. This is from six different e-mail accounts I have in my Mail.app. The rest is just open the junk mailbox once a day and spend fifteen seconds hitting "delete, delete, delete, delete." It's really not so bad.
 
yahoo update

it set up fine, compared to the hotmail nightmare, but the problem is that i type in my password and it rejects it with this error:

The POP server “pop.mail.yahoo.com” rejected the password for user “***”
Click to expand...

i entered my password exactly right in both occassions. any suggestions of what's happening?
 
furcalchick said:
it set up fine, compared to the hotmail nightmare, but the problem is that i type in my password and it rejects it with this error:
Click to expand...

Erm...obvious question...do you have a paid Yahoo account? Or do you live in a place where Yahoo POP access is free? It isn't in the US. I use MacFreePOPs to get at mine... but that means I don't use their POP server.
 
Then that would be why the POP server is rejecting your password. ;)

If you decide you really want Yahoo in mail.app, MacFreePOPs is great. You download and install it, and it parses the web interface of free e-mails into a "fake" POP server running on your computer.

Then you point mail.app back at your own computer (instead of at pop.mail.yahoo.com) and the mail comes into your Mail just like it were a real POP account.
 
Gmail is the best in my opinion. It very rarely misses a spam email, its quick, and they are always adding great features. You couldn't pay me to use Hotmail.
 
I've been using Gmail pretty much since it came out. It immediatly replaced all my other email accounts. I love it. The spam filtering is top notch (at least for me). It also works flawlessly with Apple's Mail program. I love it. I'd say go for Gmail.
 
rfrankl said:
Gmail is the best in my opinion. It very rarely misses a spam email, its quick, and they are always adding great features. You couldn't pay me to use Hotmail.
Click to expand...

Same here. I manage a bunch of different pop accounts through my one gmail account. I use labels and custom filters to keep everything organized. The spam filter works like a charm. Tons of storage. What's not to love?
 
Flowbee said:
Same here. I manage a bunch of different pop accounts through my one gmail account. I use labels and custom filters to keep everything organized. The spam filter works like a charm. Tons of storage. What's not to love?
Click to expand...

Mhmm. I use gamil and yahoo. I used to ouse yahoo but switech to gmail because it has free pop access so i could use it in mail where as you have to pay in yahoo.
 
After having switched to gmail exclusively two months ago (after having hosted my own IMAP server for the last four years), ...

Here's what I *love*:

The speed of gmail's web interface. The interface looks very plain, but I like clicking on an email or label and having it open virtually immediately.

Being able to use "Labels" to tag my email. After having used iPhoto and del.icio.us a lot lately, I love organizing by tags.

Their spam filter ROCKS for me. It catches about 15-20 spam emails for me daily.

That you can forward your gmail to another email address anywhere and can have gmail check your other pop accounts.

Here's why I am probably going to switch to .Mac:

I use a web interface to read my email about as much as I use Mail.app to read my email.

Because gmail uses POP, I haven't found a way to keep all of my mail in both Mail.app and on gmail's server without having to do double-work (like if I delete an email on the web interface, I have to manually go back and delete it in Mail.app) Le Sigh.
 
I have a Gmail account that I almost never use.

Decided to check it after seeing this thread. Again, I must stress that the account has hardly been used. And the last time that it was used was 3-4 months ago. Yet, it had over 156 spam messages since December 1st. Terrible!
 
aristobrat said:
Because gmail uses POP, I haven't found a way to keep all of my mail in both Mail.app and on gmail's server without having to do double-work (like if I delete an email on the web interface, I have to manually go back and delete it in Mail.app) Le Sigh.
Click to expand...

The best answer to this that I have found, granting that it is nothing like perfect, is to just accept the idea that you don't delete anything in your GMail inbox, and that there's no value in keeping your GMail inbox organized. You just use keyword searches or dates to find e-mails in it, and let it handle the rest... if you do that, then you can do whatever you'd normally do on the Mail.app side. It's not so bad as long as your use of mail.app is much higher than your use of the web interface.
 
I use g-mail. I found out about it around a year ago and searched around for an invite. I've used it ever since as my only e-mail address. I used to have it in Mozilla Thunderbird on my old PC, but now I have it in Apple Mail. Either way, I got it working in 5 minutes tops. G-mail gives you such great instructions on how to set it up, I think anyone could do it.

I get a lot of spam on my g-mail account, but it does go right to the spam folder. I think I get approximately 500 spam e-mails a month. It's 30 seconds of select all / delete, etc. Per month, 10 spam mails might get into my regular inbox.

As for keeping the two synchronized, I leave everything in my g-mail inbox online. That way, I have a web back-up, and I can access all of my e-mails from anywhere. And you shouldn't have to worry about space, G-mail's inbox is continiously growing (at a slower than snail-like pace, though). Another thing with the inbox is that you can search for any e-mail quickly, and the messages in your inbox give you a quick preview of the actual content of the e-mail.
 
i have an invite from like a year and a half ago, and never used it, as i was still comptent with hotmail. but with me just graduated college a couple of weeks ago, and getting the macbook and the new year, i was starting to think that hotmail is very clunky and is very annoying going to that site just to check mail and instead getting spam.

i'll give you an update later in the day.
 
psycoswimmer said:
As for keeping the two synchronized, I leave everything in my g-mail inbox online. That way, I have a web back-up, and I can access all of my e-mails from anywhere.
Click to expand...
Ah, that's kinda cool. :D I'll definitely have to play with that before deciding to switch over to .Mac
 
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