Email accounts and providers part 2

Mon, 14 Apr 2025 00:00:00 +0000

Hello again. At the end of the last post, I was sattisfied. I was using Microsoft, not the best company but also not the worst. Today, I open thunderbird to check my email and guess what!

They blocked me! For what? Not providing my real name? My real birthday? And guess how I appeal the block? That’s right:

So, once again, I am faced with the same issue.

After looking around on guides, I found a few other email providers: (Disroot, Cock.li, etc) but none of them provided exactly what I needed:

Disroot has you write about your favorite meal and doesn’t activate your account for 48? 72? I don’t remember hours.
- Not that I have anything against people having a favorite meal, It’s just that I wouldn’t want to write about it to sign up for an email service
I just couldn’t get email sending to work on cock.li with Thunderbird (Yes, I uncockblocked it.)

Due to this, I have temporarily removed the email contact method from the contact me page. I have also started considering starting my own email server.

The state of email accounts and providers

Sun, 13 Apr 2025 00:00:00 +0000

Hello everyone. This is my first post here (yay!) and so let’s get into it.

I’d like to start by discussing how annoying it is to get an email account from a popular provider. For this blog, I was looking for another email account. I didn’t want to use Proton or Tuta as I wanted integration with Thunderbird. So I looked at popular services like Gmail (shudder). Well, I learned the abomination that it has become in terms of tracking.

To even register for an account, they require that you use a non-voip number that has not “been used too many times.” This is to “make sure you’re not a robot.” Listen Google, If I wanted to make a bot that signed up for tons of accounts, I could just buy a ton of E-sims. But I don’t, I want privacy. And what happened to the tried and tested method of a captcha? Something tells me that you are not just trying to make sure that I’m not a bot, but you’re trying to collect my data?!? (Never would’ve guessed).

So then (after failing to find a phone number that they would accept), I went over to Microsoft with Outlook. That went even worse, every time I tried an email address, it was saying that it existed, even though it obviously didn’t (I mean. I think. If you are the proud owner of contactjacob.encrypted_44712@outlook.com, please feel free to email me).

After this, I tried… Yahoo. Yep, Yahoo. And let me tell you, It sucked. After filling out the create an account form, it just said that I had tried too many times. (And this was my first time) So I tried a few more times and even looked up the error. Yahoo’s response was just to wait 24 hours which I was not willing to do.

I didn’t want to rely on some obscure provider though so I looked up what might be happening wih Microsoft. As it turns out (which they don’t mention anywhere on the email creation page), you can’t create an email with the word “contact” in it. So, after learning this delightful fact I went back to Outlook and successfully made an account.

Part 2

Jacob's Site

Email accounts and providers part 2

The state of email accounts and providers