On Wed, Jan 7, 2026 at 3:01 PM The Wanderer <[email protected]> wrote: > > 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.
I hope I am not splitting too many hairs... "Forwarding" has a specific meaning in the smtp RFCs. What someone was calling "Redirection" (in another reply) is actually called "Resent". See RFC 5322, Section 3.6.6, <https://datatracker.ietf.org/doc/html/rfc5322#section-3.6.6>. Resending is definitely not forwarding. From the RFC 5322: Resent fields SHOULD be added to any message that is reintroduced by a user into the transport system. A separate set of resent fields SHOULD be added each time this is done. All of the resent fields corresponding to a particular resending of the message SHOULD be grouped together. Each new set of resent fields is prepended to the message; that is, the most recent set of resent fields appears earlier in the message. No other fields in the message are changed when resent fields are added. Note: Reintroducing a message into the transport system and using resent fields is a different operation from "forwarding". "Forwarding" has two meanings: One sense of forwarding is that a mail reading program can be told by a user to forward a copy of a message to another person, making the forwarded message the body of the new message. A forwarded message in this sense does not appear to have come from the original sender, but is an entirely new message from the forwarder of the message. Forwarding may also mean that a mail transport program gets a message and forwards it on to a different destination for final delivery. Resent header fields are not intended for use with either type of forwarding. > 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. Jeff
