all this, just to read e-mail

I finally have an e-mail setup that works.  It's taken some time and effort, and I have little confidence that this will last for long, but while it does I figure I'll share.

My first attempt, a few years ago, was quite feeble but possibly charming in its naïveté. I abandoned my Yahoo account, and on my personal domain created three e-mail accounts, one for personal friends and family, a second for general correspondence and major web sites (Amazon, eBay, etc.), and a third for bogus web sites.  Needless to say, it was a total failure, my friends couldn't keep track of the "real e-mail address", I got spam and ham on both working accounts, and it was too much effort to keep track of the junk e-mail address.

So then I turned on Outlook's junk mail filtering, and diligently clicked the link at the bottom all my spam asking to "remove me" from the list….  Please, try to contain your laughter and hide your derision.

After that failure, I installed SpamBayes, it works reasonably well, but there's simply too many ways of spelling Viagra.

 My current approach solves three problems, it significantly reduces spam, it avoids the unreliable POP servers at WebHost4Life (which I pay for), and it gives me a great UI for reading messages on mailing lists.

 I forwarded all of my mail to a Google e-mail account created just for POP (which I don’t pay for).  I pull that e-mail down into Outlook, and I'm able to send out e-mail on my own address by adding a second mail account in Outlook to use the SMTP server at WebHost4Life, but configuring Outlook never to check the POP server on that account. Finally, I send all of my Yahoo groups messages to a second Google e-mail account, and read those messages online and not in Outlook.  It's somewhat amazing, but the web-based UI, by treating the conversation as the primary entity, and not the message offers a better experience for mailing lists.  I hope the Outlook team releases a point release or service pack upgrade just to address this feature.