On 2026-01-07 at 10:42, Paul M. Foster wrote: > On 12/23/25 12:08 PM, Eben King wrote: > >> On 11/18/25 17:17, Paul M. Foster wrote: >> >>> I just need a free email address, preferably with POP3 which >>> works with Thunderbird, or IMAP if I have to. I'd appreciate any >>> assistance along these lines.
>> You can also set up an account at unfriendly_provider.com and have >> it forward messages to somewhere else that lets you use Tbird. >> That's what I do with gmail. > Your unfriendly_provider.com suggestion fails. I can't ping the URL > or whois it. It's either a misspell or they've gone away. FWIW, I parse that not as being about the literal domain 'unfriendly_provider.com' but as being about whatever domain you already have (or could readily get) an account with, from any provider who is sufficiently unfriendly that they don't offer POP3/IMAP access. The idea would be that once you have the free account, you configure it (using its Web interface if necessary) to forward all mail to another place that does offer POP3/IMAP access, and then just get the mail from that other place and ignore the free account's Web interface. That does, of course, require that you *have* access to such "another place". The only way I can think of for that to not be a chicken-and-egg problem is if you're fine with paying for an account that does provide the access type(s) in question, but want to be set up free accounts to use for e.g. throwaway purposes or to have a dedicated E-mail address for a particular mailing-list subscription. In that type of scenario, setting up a free account (with Web access only) that just forwards to a non-free one (with mail-protocol-based access) could make sense. -- The Wanderer The reasonable man adapts himself to the world; the unreasonable one persists in trying to adapt the world to himself. Therefore all progress depends on the unreasonable man. -- George Bernard Shaw
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