Gmail alternatives?
dotBen: Assuming you are ultimately comparing 'shared/managed' email hosting vs self-managed/self-hosted then Spam (well, filtering spam) is the biggest issue you have to resolve.Try turning off spam checking on any email address that's been around the net a few years.The upside of GMail (and other shared-services) is that you are benefiting from their collective wisdom of incoming spam landscape - they see the bigger picture from everyone's accounts in aggregate... which is why their spam filters are so much more effective than bayesian filtering -- which is the only tool you have if you 'go it alone' on emailWith an email address that dates back to 1994 and listed all over Usenet before we knew it would be indexed by DejaNews/Google, I need the spam protection and so I'll always go shared-hosted (Gmail for now).