POBOX

pobox keyholeI hooked up with an email service back in December 2014. I had added my e-commerce store to the AWS cloud and needed a way to handle the email traffic to the store. AWS has a very powerful and secure sending system I linked into using SMTP but AWS does not offer any inbound mail service. No mail boxes.

I stumbled across POBOX while researching a solution. I can do just what I needed with their solution. They call their system “a lifetime email address”. I bought their cheapest forwarding service (Pobox Basic) for $20 a year. It just forwards email to another address (mine).  I then added a “capture all” to my store domain name I was using, so all mail sent to the domain comes to me. It was $10 extra per year for the “capture all” and actually may not be necessary to my needs. I can add 20 names to the domain free without it and wrong names are just ignored.

Beyond My First Need

My original personal email service is still in the dark ages. It is a POP mail service and does a very poor imitation of an IMAP mail system. It usually reloads old messages several times in IMAP mode. Very nasty. Here is an explanation of the email systems available today.

Real IMAP (or MAPI for Microsoft) are the way to go with how the internet email is used today.

So I have just upgraded to is using the POBOX’s best system (Mailstore) which includes a real mailbox. (Therefor it “stores” my email rather than just forwarding.) I forward all my old addresses to their mail system and I have a full featured and functioning IMAP mailbox. It has all the filters and necessary features (and then some) for managing all my email. The spam filter is absolutely fantastic.

POBOX does a real IMAP as well as an available POP. One thing POBOX doesn’t do is exploit its users for marketing purposes like Google, AOL and all the big name free services. It does that by NOT being a free service. It is worth the cost to me.

They also provide a browser mailbox (webmail) so you can get to your email on ANY computer connected to the internet.

I found the explanations of how their system works a bit confusing. The reason is because it is very flexible. I had to do some very careful thinking of how the mail flows and what I was trying to accomplish. All the help is there, but it may not be something a pure novice will want to attempt without a knowledgeable person to help.

After the setup, it works as or better than advertised and I recommend it if you want to break away from the marketing email services or receive much improved spam filtering.