Mail clients/programmes/stuff and Gmail

[Dogg Thang]

I have had in the past no end of email issues. Too much spam. Messages vanishing, never appearing in the first place and that sort of thing. I used to use Outlook Express but whatever spam filters were active on my mail server things weren't good enough and that was a mess. At work, I use Outlook and that's okay but it's for work and I only access the mail there. Various webmails haven't been all that great and I went through a bunch of the old favourites.

And then a few years ago I switched to Gmail and everything changed.

I love Gmail. It's easy, everything is there in front of me and its spam filters, for the most part, are deadly accurate. I can check mail from anywhere and I've never once had a reliability issue ever. And now I've just discovered I can import mail from those old mail addresses and use them with Gmail and, sure enough, I have found a bunch of mails I just never got from two years ago. And life is wonderful.

Except for the obvious flaw here... I am now completely dependent on Gmail, a free service that could change at any time. They scan my emails and, yes, their ads don't get in the way yet but who knows how it will go. In five years time, they could be gone. Who knows? So it's all going great right now but feels sort of fragile.

Should I just go with it now that I've got everything working as I want it to or should I be looking for something else? Any advice? Is this a pointless thread? Maybe? Is there a Gmail equivalent that works like Gmail but is on my computer rather than on their servers? Do I even want that?

[Brad]

I use the email servers that my web host provides. They have spamassassin on there, excellent IMAP support too. I have the email picked up on 2 different macs using Apple mail, thunderbird on my work PC and also on my iPhone. No need for google to be involved (I have the same exact concerns as you).

[Dogg Thang]

Hmm... my host's email servers are either unreliable or I'm missing a load of stuff in the settings. Spam central with old Outlook Express and then missing mail after I abandoned that. And doesn't seem to work all that well on my iOS stuff - for example, the odd time a mail makes it through to my iPad (usually spam) and it won't let me move or delete it.

Thunderbird looks quite interesting. I didn't know that one at all.