Email App Discussion

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i have installed DuckDuckGo and it seems to be pretty good so far. I like the nice clean uncluttered screen. And was surprised that all my bookmarks from safari copied over easily.

I did not realize that google had such a wide range of collecting information. I'm just a home user but I certainly want as best pricvscy/security i can get!

now i'm thinking of changing all my Gmail account to another email server.
i've checked and there's so many out there Yahoo, hushmail, proton, Mozilla, spark, macOS mail and the list goes on?

I could set up an account with each of these to test them out that seems like a waste of time.
as long as all contacts are easily accessed!

anyone have any input to any of these snd want to share what they like and use?
 

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I set up a GMail account when GMail initially started and one needed an invitation to register an account.
Never used it until a couple of months ago someone wanted to email me a large file that was too big for my normal email account.
So they suggested to send it to my GMail account which had been dormant for years.
I tried logging in and after a couple of hoops and security questions I actually managed to log in - that account was still active after all those years - google never forgets.

My main email account is with my small ISP, works well and I'm pretty sure they have no interest, or even the means, to collect any of my data.

Yahoo had some major security breaches, I remember the comment was that they don't (or maybe now didn't) even encrypt your password - it was there in plain text for anyone to read; for some correspondence I use HushMail because an organization I deal with requires that - I would not use it if I had a choice, the others I don't know.

For my "throw-away" email address I use mail.com, not sure what they track, if anything, they have a paid service that may depend less on user data collection than their free service.
 

Rod


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Lori if you want the bookmarks from your laptop to appear on the mobile version of brave you will need to sync them. Chrome does this via your user account, Safari via iCloud account but with brave, because there is no login as with Firefox you need to create what Brave calls a Sync Chain. On your laptop, in Brave preferences go to sync and it will give you the instructions on how to do this.
 
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Lori, I use two email providers, the Apple iCloud account that came with my Apple ID and one at Pobox.com, provided with webmail by fastmail. The advantage of Pobox is that they have a really good spam filter process, so I don't have to put up with spam. I get one email each day listing the email they have held as spam, and have an opportunity to release any of it I may want. After a couple of months, I quit looking at the individual emails because the system had tuned itself and 100% of what they stopped was, in fact, spam. I set up the Mail app on my Mac, iPhone and iPad to point to my account at Pobox, but you can use the mail app of your choice. Ditto for the iCloud email address, but I find Apple has little to none for spam blocking. I wrote some rules in Mail to send what I deemed spam to the trash automatically. My daughter uses Proton mail, seems happy with it but I don't have any personal experience with it.

One small tutorial moment, please. You said
i've checked and there's so many out there Yahoo, hushmail, proton, Mozilla, spark, macOS mail and the list goes on?
Those are different things.Yahoo, hush mail and proton are email servers. Mozilla is a developer of a mail application, Spark is a mail application. macOS Mail is an application, but iCloud is a mail service. So what's the difference? Well, a mail service like iCloud or Pobox, or Yahoo, or proton are email servers. They provide a location in the internet where mail sent to you arrives and is then dispatched to your mail application on your Mac when you ask for it. The thing that does the asking for those messages to be transferred from the mail service to you is the application on the Mac you use for mail. macOS comes with Mail, which is pretty good, but Spark, Thunderbird and several others are good alternatives. Most folks look for one that works the way they do. You then set up that application with your account information at iCloud, Yahoo, Pobox, proton, etc. Finally, some email services offer what is known as Webmail, where you can go to the website with any browser and log into your account and read the mail directly from the mail provider servers. iCloud and Pobox offer that for sure as I have been to both, I think Yahoo and Proton do as well, but I don't use them.

Think of it this way. Imagine the post office changes how it operates and only delivers mail when you call. So a friend sends you a letter, addressed to you at your post office address. The letter arrives at the local post office and waits there for you to call. You call and the letter is delivered to you. If you go to the post office, you can get your mail over the counter, directly. Now in email it works just like that. Someone sends you an email at an address in the internet. The message is delivered to your email service, where it is held until your system calls for it. The mail application you use, whether Apple's Mail, or Spark, or Thunderbird or any other local application, will make the call over the internet to get any messages being held for you and display them to you in the Inbox for you to open and read. If you go to the webmail service your mail provider may offer, you are reading the message directly from their server.

Hope that helps and doesn't add complexity. Basically, you pick the mail server you want (apple, proton, pobox, yahoo, hotmail, even gmail) and then the application you want to use (Mail, Spark, Thunderbird, a browser) and set it up to know what account you have and to get your messages for you.
 
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wow jake!!! ...that was a wonderful explanation. guess you figured out that I was not really sure what I was talking about.
where can one download or lookup this Pobox you speak of?

if one uses duckduckgo e.g.. most of the time and every now and then use Pobox or another email service and saves a bookmark there..does that bookmark get over to duckduckgo?

I'm like a worm....one question answered, and I have more to ask. got to stop for now. getting confused and have to sort this out before I do any changing.
thanks very much for your patience and help with this newbie!!
 
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aha seems Pobox is a pay service. I found Pobox Lifetime..mayb thats the wrong one.
 
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Pobox is a service. Pobox Lifetime Email - Mailboxes, Email Forwarding, Spam Protection and Personal Domains is the website.

More tutorial. You said:
if one uses duckduckgo e.g.. most of the time and every now and then use Pobox or another email service and saves a bookmark there..does that bookmark get over to duckduckgo?

DuckDuckGo is a search engine, not email. It does what Google does to let you search the Internet, but keeps your identity private. So, for example, you can search for "British Columbia" and see places with information on BC in the Internet. Once you find a good site about BC you like, you can set a bookmark for that so you can find it quickly again.

Bookmarks are "shortcuts" to web locations. So, in your browser (Safari or Brave, for example) you would save a bookmark for the BC website and when you wanted to go there, instead of typing in "www.<<whatever>>.com" you just click on the bookmark and your browser opens that site. DuckDuckGo knows nothing about your bookmarks but you can always set DuckDuckGo as a bookmark if you wanted to. Or you can set DuckDuckGo to be the default search engine for your browser and not need a bookmark.

DuckDuckGo does NOT do mail. It does not provide mail service. It just searches the internet.

- - - Updated - - -

Yes, I forgot to say Pobox is a pay service. I pay US$50/year for email service and spam filtering. But nothing is "free" in that a lot of the so-called "Free" email services sell your information to pay for the costs. Apple doesn't sell your data, but you pay for the service when you buy an Apple product and get an Apple ID with associated email account. Ditto for Microsoft.
 
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jake...thnx for link...tho don't want to pay.

I know that duckduckgo is a search engine. and I'm trying to use it instead of google search engine.

bookmarks I am familiar and have lots of them. I was just confused...ive been using safari with google search engine. so as I will continue using Safari with duckduckgo search engine... or another if I choose, I don't have to be concerned about bookmarks.

I do save a lot to reading list also. they are different, in that I do not need internet to read them, correct? is there a way to copy all those links to external file/device?

I'm working on changing my gmail email accounts to yahoo mail. tho just because I don't use gmail anymore...the data is still there! too bad one can't delete it all.

tho adding email accounts to macbook, there are few options, icloud,MS exchange,google, AOL, outlook and other. but when one chooses other, they require check off some items (add ldap account, add cardDav account and same for subscribed calendar.....I have no idea what they are about. so ill stick with what I know for now!!

for now choosing to use iCloud...as am still not comfortable with ALL what it does!

so far all is going well.
 
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lori5060 said:
so am assuming if i were to try using google drive and photos..... those also collect data?

what about gmail? i have all gmail accounts and use apple mail to access them.

Google's business model is to give folks free services and software that they can't resist, and then they use those to gather information about you which they aggregate and then sell to businesses for advertising purposes. So you can pretty much assume that if a product comes from Google/Alphabet, that they are tracking you and scanning your stuff for information and then selling that information. They aren't giving you a lot of free stuff to be nice.

lori5060 said:
have been toying with trying to use Gmail app instead of using Apple app for reading my mail.
so is data collected with that also?

Apple's Mail, to the best of my knowledge, does not spy on you. It's your Gmail accounts that you have to be concerned about.

Instead of using Gmail, there are other free e-mail services that don't spy on you, and which can even be encrypted for the ultimate in security and privacy:

Proton Mail
Secure email: ProtonMail is free encrypted email.
(encrypted, based in Switzerland)

Tutanota
Secure email: Tutanota makes free encrypted emails easy.
(very secure encrypted e-mail)

GMX
Unique email address @GMX.com: Free & feature-packed
(allows sending large attachments)

Yandex
Yandex.Mail — free, reliable email

lori5060 said:
what search engine would be best if not using google?

DuckDuckGo is a nice secure search engine. Unfortunately my experience is that it gives really poor results compared to a Google search. So instead I recommend:

StartPage
Startpage.com - The world's most private search engine

What StartPage does is really cool! They submit your search to Google's search engine, but before doing that they strip out any identifying information about who is requesting the search. So you get the benefit of doing a Google search, without Google spying on you! The best of both world's!

Similarly, Chrome is an Internet browser that many users love for it's speed, interface, and all of the nice plug-ins available for it. Many Mac users like it way more than Safari. But it comes from Google and is best avoided for the usual reasons. The good news is that several companies have taken the underlying code of the Chrome browser, stripped out all of Google's spyware, and they have even added a bunch of nice features, such as ad-blocking and other security. My current favorite of these is:

Brave (free)
Features | Brave Browser

Brave is FAST! It's very secure. It's a joy to use. It doesn't conflict with Safari, so you can have both installed at the same time with no worries.
 
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thanks randy
start page sounds interesting....may try it out. one gets accustomed to same apps, browsers and search engines so easily. always good to try others. and there are sooo many out there. have received some great ideas from you folks at Mac-forums.
 
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I've been using gmx.com with Thunderbird for about three months, no complaints. Spam filters work very well on MBP but some rubbish is getting through on phone and iPad.
 
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yes I also have an old gmx.com that I had several years ago. but never used it. .......maybe will try again.

just checked with my phone provider and they do not offer emails anymore. I thought that would be the safest especially for banking etc..
now need to decide which is best and safest email provider for that purpose.

off into research mode I go........
 
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yes I also have an old gmx.com that I had several years ago. but never used it. .......maybe will try again.

just checked with my phone provider and they do not offer emails anymore. I thought that would be the safest especially for banking etc..
now need to decide which is best and safest email provider for that purpose.

off into research mode I go........

I had to change because my old provider were going to start charging as I no longer used them for internet. I had a few queries moving over but GMX gave fast, useful replies which I never got in 20 years of using TalkTalk!
 
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now need to decide which is best and safest email provider for that purpose.

Maybe your Apple email account might be the best and it is independent of any ISP???


- Patrick
======
 

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Maybe your Apple email account might be the best and it is independent of any ISP???


- Patrick
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They're discussing ISP providers which is still needed in addition to the Apple Mail app. For example: I use Apple Mail but Gmail is my provider (email account).
 

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The list Apple iCloud email which is a new one to me.

Apple started that some years ago when they implemented iCloud. I believe everyone who has an Apple ID can make use of it. The account is IMAP only.
 
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They're discussing ISP providers which is still needed in addition to the Apple Mail app.

I was just suggesting using the Apple User E-mail address regardless of who the ISP is and there by save changing any e-mail addresses whenever any ISP change is made.


- Patrick
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I've been using iCloud.com for a few years. The only issue I've had just happened last week. I somehow logged out of my iCloud account and all my mail was gone. It did not affect the Mail on our iPhone. Once I got logged back in, everything was back.
 
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I've been using iCloud.com for a few years. The only issue I've had just happened last week. I somehow logged out of my iCloud account and all my mail was gone. It did not affect the Mail on our iPhone. Once I got logged back in, everything was back.


Hmmm...??? Isn't that just one of the "features" of an IMAP email account is it not???


- Patrick
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