IIS Aid

How do I fare with other free email providers

This explanation did not sit right with me as I knew I had a reasonably tight email setup, plus the fact that I still get half a dozen or so emails a week in my Hotmail account that are obviously spam which go directly to my inbox. As a test I decided I would sign up with several other free email service providers and see what happened to my email when sending to those accounts. I did a quick search on the most popular free email services in use today, and found this article. I went ahead and signed up an account with each of the following providers leaving the spam filtering in each of them to the default settings, and sent each of them an identical email;

• Gmail
• Inbox
• FastMail
• Yahoo
• AOL Mail
• HotPOP
• Groowy Email
• MSN Hotmail
• BigString
• My Way Mail

How did it turn out? Well, after testing all ten accounts I can say that Hotmail was the only provider that did not deliver my mail. Not only that, but my email went straight to the inbox with 8 of those providers. The mail I sent to my Inbox account arrived, but was directed to the spam folder. I raised three support tickets with Inbox support asking why my mail was sent to the spam folder, but the only reply I ever got was to loosen my spam filtering or add my address to the whitelist. I tried to explaining that wasn’t the point, but could never get my message through. I took some solace in the fact that mail sent from my Googlemail and Yahoo accounts to my Inbox account were also sent to the spam folder.