So Long BlueBottle, Hello ThinkPost
I have decided to switch my email provider because Blue Bottle looked a bit stagnant since 2007 and I had an outage with them about a week ago with no news or comment on the matter. They also have a problem with their MX records since they moved to a new data centre. It caused a delay in receiving emails and sometimes it could take over 1 hours for the new emails to be delivered. Whilst this doesn’t seem like a long delay, it was frustrating if you was waiting for new account details or confirmation emails.
Despite all those problems they did provide a good service and it was cheap. Their storage size was no match for modern services like Gmail or mail.com but it was enough for me because I don’t use IMAP (whole another story which can be explained in another post).
I was searching for a good email host comparison but the web seemed to lack a full list. I guess there is a lot of email providers but I would have thought the top 10 providers would appear in majourity of the comparison sites but they didn’t. Also it was hard to specify the critera when I was searching.
In the end I found one on Wikipedia.
I didn’t want to spend more than £30 a year on email and it must have POP and IMAP support (yes I know I don’t use IMAP but just in case). The two I was considering was Thinkpost.net and Tuffmail
I decided on Thinkpost.net because of the web 2.0 style interface and the wide variety of services they offered like BlackBerry syncronization and tools to import contacts and calendars. Also they had a demo account for you to try before you buy.
It was nice that you could select the currency you want to pay in. Naturally I selected the USD. The telephone number was a bit awkward. It had 3 or for boxes which allowed 3-4 numbers each and an addition box for the extension. I had to cut off the leading “0” to make my phone number fit. This is important because it was the billing form. The second problem was after the payment there was a white plain html page which described what had to be filled in in the next form but these instructions would disappear because you had to click on a link to get to the form. I had to open the link in another tab to make sure I did it right. The form was there for you to choose your email address with Thinkpost.net. What I didn’t get was what would happen if the email address was taken? It seemed like a very manual way of implementing this portion of the system.
So far it has been running smoothly and I will definitely post more stuff if things do go right or wrong.
