Could you recommend an up and coming e-mail client?

www.gmx.com

www.fastmail.fm

I think gmail is still considered one of the best, there’s not really a whole lot of providers that can offer all of that for free. The others are mainly places like Microsoft (live.com) and Yahoo with their mail service.

If you like gmail, but just want another address, they offer Google Apps for $50/yr that you can have on your own domain essentially. So you could have me@whitetigress.com (assuming you own whitetigress.com)

There are also several companies offering alternative clients for gmail, mailbox and mailbird are two that comes to mind.

At least a couple secure email providers (lavabit, silent circle) have shut down recently and while they don’t say exactly why, it’s heavily implied that they can’t guarantee they won’t have to hand over your emails and may even be targetted simply by using the services. I guess I’m just saying if the revolution comes, lanterns (one if by land, two if by sea) might be more secure than email.

From my current understanding of this, I would just say that you will be hard pressed to find one that is private and does not share its records. For instance, phone service providers during the patriot act era, when asked for their records, only two amongst a great many declined. I can only remember one of them being “Quest.” Good luck though.

I’m not sure what you are asking. GMAIL and that sort of thing are really Email SERVICES, in that they hold onto your mail and you access your mail through a web browser.

An Email CLIENT – such as Eudora, Windows Live Mail, Thunderbird, etc., is a program that DOWNLOADS the email from the mail server to your desktop or laptop (or smartphone) and once it has downloaded the email, deletes it from the server.

There is a huge difference in how they work. Which one do you really want?

Web services like GMAIL offer easy access on the web, but they are more open to government spying. Clients can be less convenient (depends on your personal habits), but are generally more secure.

As long as an email is sitting on an email server it’s open to government inspection. Even moving from the server to the client is open to that.

On that note, though, I use Outlook.com, Gmail, and GMX. I like the Outlook web interface. I think they did a good job with it. I also user Thunderbird as a client, although I’m losing my love for it.