I’m going to have to start using another email service. Which means, yes another email address. Which really sucks.
I love my super short @live.com address, but Hotmail’s spam servers suck so much.
This happens randomly, but increasingly more frequent lately. Everything will be fine. Days can pass by without a single spam mail. Then all of a sudden for hours I get spam mail after spam mail.
What even magnifies the situation is that I get at least 2 alerts per mail. 1 ) Hotmail alerts me via messenger, my phone alerts me, and the mail box alerts me. (another mail just popped up, ah!).
I have the Hotmail settings on high or whatever, is the default settings. I’ve never touched them. it just seems the Hotmail spam service breaks down randomly.
I’ve tried many times to contact hotmail regarding the spam, but at no avail, and I’m just really fed up and annoyed.
Example of my inbox:
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This screenshot was just taken before I started writing this entry. And since I’ve started writing this mail I’ve been notified of several more, ha one more just popped up…. This is so ridiculous.
I’m very sad though about having to start using another mail service and address because I do really like hotmail and the way it works with Windows Live Mail (desktop application). Especially how good it works with Live Messenger. Live Messenger actually isn’t even that great anymore, but that’s another issue. one problem I have with hotmail and live messenger is it keeps saying I have at least 3 emails in my inbox, which I do not. blah!
So I started looking at my alternatives for free email. First I needed my address to be short, which rules out Gmail. At gmail your username must be 6 characters. All the good 6 char names are taken, and I’d be stuck with using a bunch of numbers, which is lame. I have gmail accounts from 2004 already that are too long, and I don’t want to use.
I registered a short @ymail.com address when Yahoo! announced that you could get @ymail.com and @rocketmail.com addresses, but meh, I really dislike Yahoo! mail. The web interface is ugly in my opinion, and from last I heard, they still don’t allow you to use your mail client for IMAP or POP mail access. So Yahoo! is out.
I do really like GMX. They allow both IMAP and POP mail access, and have a beautiful Web User Interface, But, a lot of servers block GMX mail, such as Craigslist. Sometimes I like to sell or buy stuff on Craigslist, and I don’t want to have to use a different email for it. So GMX is out at no fault of its own.
After going over these mail options, I suddenly remembered a month ago I applied for the AOL Project Phoenix mail beta. So I randomly went to my old AOL email account, and WOHOO! I had an invite that was sent to me on December 14th!
So I signed up, and got a super short email address. It’s actually ***@wow.com (I didn’t put the actually email address because I don’t want Spam bots to pick it up 
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The Project Phoenix Web UI is so beautiful. It’s nice. GMX is a bit more appealing, but Phoenix is more clean, simple, and just elegant. I like it. Better yet, AOL gives you free IMAP and POP access, so I can still use my Windows Live Mail client.
So I’m super happy that I found a new mail solution. I don’t know how well the spam filtering is going to be, but it can’t be any worse than Hotmail’s horrible filters.
You can check out Project Phoenix by visiting http://phoenix.aol.com/main . I did get 10 invites to share, but sadly I already used them all. If I do get more, I’ll post them here for people to grab.
