So I’m planning on moving away from Yahoo mail. It’s been wonderful to go many years without having to change my personal email address, but:

• the reliability has been spotty lately
• they started charging, which is fair, but it makes me wonder what other services are out there
• the email hack, ugh
• it’s time to ditch POP and move up to IMAP. I span multiple computers and multiple places, and can’t deal with having messages trapped on a particular hard drive anymore

So I registered a shiny new vanity domain name. I just want to point it at an IMAP account. So I’m looking for a service. I started trying mac.com, which is mostly good except for

• webmail doesn’t seem to work on non-Macs
• they started charging $8.33/month, again this is fair but makes me want to evaluate other services
• i can have my mail forwarded to mac.com, and set my vanity domain as the return address, but mac.com still shows up in the “To:” field, not ideal.

If you know of an inexpensive, reliable, personal IMAP provider let me know. I’ll post the results right [here].

Here is here: Christina mentioned both dreamhost and oddpost. Dreamhost seems like a great option if you also need hosting, but I’m all set with pair.com. Oddpost only works on IE/Win. I’m willing to switch out of Mozilla now and then, but Win only is a deal killer.

I ended up with myrealbox, a site set up by Novell to display the capabilities of their NetMail product. While that makes me feel a bit like a guinea pig, it seems OK, and the user base is pretty big. It’s free, there’s no ads, it does IMAP, and the web interface is pretty good, though not entirely Mozilla/Mac happy, but then that’s not too rare these days. If it collapses completely I can always bail and go back to mac.com without having to change my email address. It’s mine, all mine, I’m a greedy miser.