Hey, before CM nukes the place, I have a question for masses (er, tiny village).

I still use Thunderbird as my local email catcher, but I've become more and more frustrated at it's poor filtering abilities. My inbox has recently become flooded with spam (171 emails in the last 36 hours), and I either can't filter them because they have return addresses like adifasnaogh@fodaofjglgd.com or the return email is <> or the return email is actually my ISP address.

Anyway, what I want to know is:

1) what email software do you currently use (web-based or local proggy)
2) what do you do (if anything) about spam

Thanks (and thanks for all the help of various and sundry sorts over the last decade or so)!

Gmail.

Sorry if it's unhelpful, but there it is. I use my own domain with Google Apps for Work. Google is a lousy company with one good product, and sadly that product happens to be Gmail.

Edit: My company uses an internally hosted Exchange... with Google spam quarantine. :shrug:

I second Gmail. I use it exclusively.

I once watched one of my user's daily spam load drop from 1000+ daily (not an exaggeration) to 0 by moving him to a Google Apps account. No false positives. He was previously using a mail server that I had set up with spamassassin operating as best as I could get it. Google is clearly much better at spam filtering than I ever will be. I'm okay with that.

You can use normal UAs like Thunderbird or Outlook with Gmail and still get the spam filtering. It's your best option right now.

With Google Apps you can also do the spam quarantine with self hosted email, as mentioned. The idea is to keep internal emails confidential, filtering only external emails that aren't confidential anyway.

But that still requires self hosting email, which is literally one of the worst and most painful things.

I've heard Outlook is the alternative to Gmail, but is there anything Outlook does better (if I'm not an enterprise)?

Gmail and Outlook aren't directly comparable, since Gmail is a hosted solution that includes the full stack. Outlook is just a client - it requires an email server (Exchange, or SMTP and POP3 or IMAP) to communicate. You can connect it to Gmail.

I have 2 gmail accounts, one for work which is administered by IT, and one I created a few years ago, but now activated on my phone. These are both separate from the email address I've been using for eons through my ISP.

So if my tech-tarded brain understand you correctly, I can configure gmail to retrieve my emails from my ISP's email server and use that instead of Thunderbird?

Not as far as I know. If your ISP allows it, you can forward your emails to Gmail. That will get you the spam filtering.

If you have a custom domain and a buncha $ you can get Gmail or Google spam filtering for it. But it's not meant for single users.

I will find out. Their tech support chat is decent. Thanks for the tip.

Yes. You can configure your Gmail account to grab the mail from a different mail server/ISP via POP3. Settings -> Accounts and Import -> Check mail from other accounts.

However, what I meant was the opposite: that you can use Thunderbird to view and send messages via Gmail.

Also: don't use your ISP-provided email for anything. Once you switch to a different ISP you lose access to it.

It would appear that he doesn't switch ISPs very often. Neither do I but I don't remember the last time I used an ISP provided email address. Still, it's certainly reasonable to use ISP email, especially if you're downloading it to the local machine.

versus using an e-mail address provided by the temperamental cornerstone of a dying industry that was recently reorganized under a publicly traded private equity firm. Nobody has any long-term plan for retaining any e-mail address, even if you self-host.