What is the best free web-based email service?

March 19, 2006 8:32 PM

What is the best free web-based email service?

What is the best free web-based email service? I'm looking for something besides Hotmail, Yahoo and Gmail. I've tried all three. All of them have their idiosyncracies. Gmail seems to be cool kid on the block, but I absolutely hate their "conversation" system of grouping email. It's remarkably unintuitive to me.

In my perfect world, it would be Gmail without the baloney conversation system.

Is there any other ones out there worth looking at? Or alternately, any Gmail hacks to deal with the conversation grouping?

posted by frogan to computers & internet (9 comments total)

Have you considered fastmail.fm?
posted by Rhomboid at 8:49 PM on March 19, 2006

I love Gmail. When I first heard about it, I thought Conversations was a terrible, terrible idea and I boycotted for awhile. But once I tried it out for awhile, I learned to love it. Of course, YMMV.

I looked for the real answer to your question (about hacking to disable Conversations) with no luck. I thought there used to be a setting for that, but evidently not. Sorry. But if you haven't used Gmail much, give it a chance... Conversations may grow on you. Of course, if you have used it awhile and they haven't, never mind this non-answer answer.
posted by SuperNova at 9:08 PM on March 19, 2006

I second the fastmail.fm recommendation. It does everything I want from a free webmail account, and very little that I don't.
posted by hades at 10:11 PM on March 19, 2006

I think gmail's conversation grouping works on matching subject lines, so perhaps if you setup a script that relayed mail through but added a random number to each email's subject line then the conversation threading wouldn't happen.

I love the conversation model though, so have never tried such a thing.
posted by bruceyeah at 10:38 PM on March 19, 2006

I've seen fastmail have problems.

I much prefer gmail, being free and all.
posted by justgary at 10:56 PM on March 19, 2006

If you have a webhost you could set up roundcube. www.roundcube.net
posted by atom128 at 3:49 AM on March 20, 2006

Third fastmail.
posted by essexjan at 6:05 AM on March 20, 2006

Gmail hands down, but I've never used fastmail. Does it require a fastmail.fm domain? That seems really weird using a *.fm extension.
posted by vanoakenfold at 7:52 AM on March 20, 2006

Fourth for fastmail. And, vanoakenfold, they have around 50 different domains to choose from. The basic service is free and it's easy (and cheap) to upgrade the service.
posted by erebora at 8:31 AM on March 20, 2006