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General discussion

Do you use a free Web-based e-mail service as your primary e-mail address?

Nov 15, 2013 10:07AM PST
For your primary personal e-mail address, do you use a free Web-based e-mail
service (example: G-mail, Yahoo mail, Hotmail, etc.)?


-- Yes. (Do you trust it to be your primary e-mail address?)
-- No. (Why not?)
-- I do use one of those Web-based e-mail service, but I pay. (Do you think paying makes it more secure or private?)

Place your poll votes here: http://forums.cnet.com/2706-21566_102-2344.html

Discussion is locked

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I use several email addresses
Nov 15, 2013 10:33AM PST

I have email accounts with Comcast (my primary), Yahoo (two actually), Gmail, and Juno. I only give my primary address to people I know and trust. If I ever get spam at my primary account, I add a filter to Windows Live Mail so any more from that source go straight to the junk folder. I use WLM for my primary and online for Yahoo, Gmail, and Juno.

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Cheers to you, I have a similar yet bit different approach..
Nov 15, 2013 2:43PM PST

My primary account is taken care of by my brother dealing heavily with networking issues and running a successful business of his own. I too use Mail.com, Yahoo, Gmail, and am sure I've forgotten some that I'm not using but needed to create at the time. My bills and personal business goes primary and is filtered to folders there for me t take care of while I use the other accounts for security reasons when required to proceed. I love having the extra Free accounts available to help take some of the pressure off of the main one and occassionally I have to test accounts, move files, or just access the free account from the net to send messages or files when I'm not at my own PC. Names and passwords are more easily used for the free account than remembering at home where the PC does it for me. I agree about the trustfullness of accounts and know that certain ones are better than others. It is usually the senders/recipients to be more worried about than the highly known account workers. They can't afford to have things collapse on them. Good Luck everyone. Check out Mail.com !+!+!

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free email "joys"
Nov 15, 2013 11:24AM PST

I do not trust much of anything in lieu of government and hackers. Alas, I have no choice but to use for conversing with family members who do not live in the same area I do. Free email uses your mail to send out advertising, thus, how they make money. My spam folder fills up quickly on Yahoo, and I now have two emails, one is also free but use it to send more junk mail that way.
In essence, there seems to be more privacy in jail than outside of it.

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there's always hushmail
Nov 15, 2013 11:51AM PST

Hushmail offers a free email account where the contents of your mailbox are encrypted as are the individual mail items in transit. If you need more storage than the free account allows there is a premium level with limits and the fees aren't too bad.

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I use my ISP for my primary
Nov 15, 2013 12:14PM PST

I have several email addresses with my ISP, which I use for most day-to-day activity and for personal email. I also have 2 Yahoo and 1 Gmail accounts. I need at least one Yahoo address in order to be in my groups and I need a Gmail address for my tablet. I find that Yahoo is so targeted by spammers that it has become almost unusable. I only give one of those addresses to places I don't trust. The Gmail account is okay. I only use it for tablet-based activity. I have done reasonably well with my ISP addresses. Only one has been compromised, and only to a manageable degree.

I used to pay for Yahoo, but I quickly discovered that the employees there (at least one of them) are nasty and vindictive. I was shut out of my email account repeatedly and my emails were deleted. Since they refused to get their employees under control, I stopped that account and I will not deal with them again.

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Do you Trust your Free Email Service?
Nov 15, 2013 2:43PM PST

I dont think it really matters if you use a free service such as gmail or a aid service. When you go through a system that is out of your control you have no idea who is looking at your messages or indeed what they are extracting from your messages.

The only way to be totally secure is to have one network that you own fully and is not connected to any other network and only yourself using it. Of course this would be totally useless so a little faith has to be put in email services such as Google, Yahoo etc

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banal is safe
Nov 16, 2013 12:44AM PST

What I put on e-mail is so uninteresting to anyone other than my contact that no one is likely to try to hack it.

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Banal is Safe
Nov 16, 2013 3:48AM PST

In the content maybe but you have information about you in the header that you dont see in the standard email and it is that information that could be useful to a 3rd party

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Care for another round of Dwarf Fortress?
Nov 16, 2013 4:14AM PST
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That's exactly my case
Nov 21, 2013 8:50PM PST

I'm using Gmail, Hotmail and Yahoo accounts mostly to keep contact with friends and family. There's barely any interesting info there, I should be concerned about.