I’ve always kept three active e-mail accounts. One I only give out to my close friends and family, one I give to friends and contacts, and the third is the one I use publicly, on this page and whenever I sign up for anything via the web (this shuffles most of my spam to the public addy).
Due to changes in Yahoo! Mail‘s terms of service, I need to discontinue using my @yahoo.com address. My new public e-mail address is djwudi@myrealbox.com.
(Incidentally, parents, friends, or anyone who has either of my other two addys — you don’t need to worry, those are staying the same).
Yesterday, Yahoo! Mail sent out a notice to all of its POP3 service users (this allowed you to use an external client — such as the Mac OS X Mail program — to check your Yahoo! Mail account, rather than having to use the web-based client) stating that as of April 24th, they would no longer be providing this service for free — rather, you’d have to purchase a $30/year ‘premium’ account. Since I would much rather use my Mail client than have to use the web client, I decided to find a new public addy.
I found a thread on MetaFilter discussing this, and one of the comments suggested that we take a look at Lycos UK‘s free e-mail, as it has the best free e-mail deal available on the web today (“…15 meg of storage, POP3 access, and importantly — SMTP access with unlimited attachment size for outgoing mail.”).
So, I stopped by this morning and signed up. Now I just have to ferret out all those places on the web that I gave my yahoo.com addy and change them over…(sigh).
Update: For one reason or another, the lycos.co.uk server was incredibly slow, to the point where it proved unuseable. I did end up finding MyRealBox, which is run by the folks at Novell, and looks to be a truly good service. So…that’s the addy I’m at now.
Update: In the end, MyRealBox didn’t cut it either. As with many people, I’ve since moved to Gmail. If you really need to find me and don’t have my e-mail addy already, check the ‘about’ page on this site to track me down.