Paid email subscription issues, service options are quite limited
Are you looking for paid email subscription? An email service which would be always reliable? I was looking for that 2 years ago, also a year ago and now again. Honestly, I am not very impressed.
Email service requirements
My requirements are quite simple: send and receive emails. POP3 is a ‘must have’, I don’t want keep my emails on some cloud.
The most important requirement is almost 100% email delivery success. Believe it or not, any IP address used for sending emails will appear on a blacklist. We are in the war against billions of spam messages.
How is Gmail?
I tried paid Gmail and I gave up. I understand the security, and extra settings to allow POP3 in desktop and mobile Outlook was easy to set up. And why did I give up Gmail? Lack of support. Basically I paid for Google Workspace and when I requested help, there was no one around.
The price is an issue too. I don’t want to pay a subscription here and there. With this behaviour I would blow away up to 500 dollars per year for some subscriptions together.
The price includes services like Drive, Meet, Chat, Slides, etc. I want email only.
Amazon WorkMail not reliable
I switched to Amazon WorkMail. I did believe I wouldn’t see a notification about a blocked IP address for sending emails. Sadly, it happened. I was not able to send an email to my clients and I had to use an alternative email address which is confusing for my clients and annoying for me.
You cannot decide with Amazon WorkMail what is spam for you and what’s not. You cannot add some email addresses into the whitelist. PayPal emails appeared in the spam folder only. No POP3 for downloading messages.
I had to change the server’s region twice.
Zoho Mail is not what you want
I thought I would give a try to ZOHO mail. First of all, I didn’t like the country detection. They provided DNS records for my domain name which ended with extension ‘dot eu’. The EU is a political institution, I would be happy to stick with ‘dot com’.
Anyway, if you have a look at a few reviews https://www.trustpilot.com/review/www.zoho.com you don’t want that company.
Professional Business Email by Namecheap
Yes, what a lovely name for an email service. The price is from 0.91 USD per month. I tried them too. I don’t like their ‘Jellyfish Spam Protection’, some emails are not delivered and again, and ending IP addresses appears to be blacklisted after a few months.
Proton mail promising privacy
They promise you encryption and best privacy. It’s the 21st century and we all gave away our privacy a long time ago. Anyway, they don’t offer POP3 for downloading messages.
I’ve found it disturbing that proton mail is a “project supported by the European Union’s Horizon 2020 program (Grant No 848554)”.
Premium Outlook
If you would like to stick with paid Outlook, it would be a good choice if it would be as a standalone service. Microsoft is offering only a whole Office package which includes, as mentioned, Outlook but also Word, Excel, PowerPoint etc. I have Office 2016 and I am happy with that, it means I don’t want to pay for services that I don’t want.
You cannot control a blacklisted IP address
This is quite important to know. You cannot control what IP address for sending emails will appear in some blacklist. This is because the server’s IP address is used by many users (including spammers). Hosting companies have an indifferent approach to removing their IP address from the blacklist.
What is the best email service?
If you were waiting for some simple answer, I don’t have one. I’m sorry, I just don’t know.
The whole internet, software and hardware business is aggressively using the best marketing agencies. Technologies are updated, upgraded, changed.
What was working well suddenly has annoying features and extra services which often have the one main purpose: to collect users’ data.