Which email provider do you use?

[ScariestFairyByFar]

I'm in the process of becoming self employed and need to set up a work email which providers and best and look most professional after the @?

Your own domain.

Gmail will never, ever cut it.

we have domains through 1and1

DH's website - so his work email is [email protected]
and a spare one so that we all have personal emails
[email protected]
ds@thepeacefamily etc etc

total cost including the website is around £80 a year
so email addresses are now unaffected by broadband and hosting providers

anything like hotmail, gmail, yahoo looks like spam or fly by night nowadays

Gmail for domains, so it's my company name but with Google's interface.

It's no longer free, however. I have a grandfathered account that will remain free but new ones are no longer available.

I configure all my devices to use imap protocol so essentially it's like having your mail in the cloud anyway.

I download all mine to Thunderbird so that we can mix and match between our 11 email addresses. Have webmail too, but don't use it much.
I like being offline when I'm out.

I like Thunderbird too, TP, but I'm hearing rumours they are going to stop developing and supporting it.

ooh - I'll check that because we have a HUGE archive on it.

I would keep an eye for sure. I imagine they won't cancel it, just not improve it. But who knows? It's just rumours I'm hearing from my techy friends.

Here is the situation from the horse's mouth on future support for Thunderbird - doesn't look too scary to me.

So it's going to be stable, but not improved. Fair enough.

Although I would worry that the lack of updates to the code might mean that some clients may not feed to it any more.

"some clients may not feed to it any more"

There aren't any clients that feed to Thunderbird, that's not how it works. The standards that Thunderbird (and every other significant email client except Microsoft Outlook when talking to a Microsoft Exchange server) uses to communicate with email servers (Mail User Agents) aren't going to be dropped in the foreseeable future, and if they do it would be a trivial matter to provide a patch for Thunderbird and if Mozilla weren't interested in doing it any one of the millions of other users can - that's the whole point of Open Source software.

But Mozilla aren't saying that they won't support it anyway, they are just saying that they won't work on any more bells and whistles. There has been an active community providing bells and whistles for some time, if you really want an email client that can open a can of beans

A can of beans you say? Could be useful.

And what I meant is that at some point someone is going to come up with something beyond POP3/MMX/etc. And then Thunderbird will indeed have to rely on 3rd party developers!