Gmail vs. Yahoo!

[Jeff G.]

I'm considering moving away from production use of Gmail for collecting from or being the recipient of forwards from high-spam-percentage accounts for a number of reasons:

1. Gmail doesn't include in any Header Lines the IP Addresses of its web-based users when they send email like most every other web-capable public email system, causing their server's IP Address to get listed for spamming, rather than their web-based spammer users' IP Addresses, and causing their web-based spammers users to gravitate towards it because they can hide their IP Addresses.

2. Gmail doesn't have any real capabilities to modify their spam filter, such as turning it off, whitelisting, blacklisting, or granular selection of filtering resources (such as blocklists, blacklists, and SpamAssassin), like the SpamCop Email System has.

3. Gmail doesn't offer IMAP access, like the SpamCop Email System and some others do.

4. While Gmail offers authenticated SMTP access, it forces the authenticated user's identity on the emails it processes.

5. I'm not all that comfortable with the idea of Gmail having so much access to my email that they can use that access to target ads they send me.

OTOH, Gmail has excellent capacity, POP access, web access, SMTP access, and some interesting filtering, labeling, and fast searching capabilities, and their ads are only in their web-based access method.

I'm thinking about switching those accounts over to using my account with Yahoo! UK because I can turn off its spam/bulk filter, I can POP from it, I can auth-SMTP through it, I can access it via the web, and it has a 1.0GB capacity. Downsides are lack of IMAP, conflict with my two Yahoo! .com accounts (I can only be logged in as one Yahoo! user at a time per browser program, and I haven't yet figured out how to share or transfer My Yahoo! Bookmarks between my accounts), and "whaddya mean, .uk?". I picked ".uk" because it's not ".com" (where POP & SMTP were swiped) and I was pretty darn sure the site would be in English, my language of choice.

[A.J.Mechelynck]

Gmail now offers whitelisting: anything "from" one of your "contacts" will never be treated as spam. It's not IP-based but from-line-based (and therefore spoofable) but I found it listed in their help as being the way to avoid having the mail from "a particular somebody" always listed as spam.

I'd rather have them do no filtering at all and leave it to my POP client (formerly I used SpamPal, which is Windows-only but works as a front-end for any mail client; now, on Linux, I use the Bayesian filters built into Thunderbird. Both are -AFAICT- excellent.)