The Black Vault

I've had accounts with the three major providers for years, some since I started using the internet. Gmail I only signed up with to register for one forum (not this one) and have done nothing else with it yet it still managed to get two spam mails. Yahoo I've been with for years and have used it primarily as a means to register to gaming sites and related things. Then there is my main account with hotmail, had it forever. I use it not only for correspondence with friends and family but for registering to more meaningful sites, such as this one.

Over the years I've dealt with the increased spam and violations of my privacy like everyone else but I'm tired of it. I've been trying to clean up my many years of leaving a trail everywhere but have been steadily running into resistance. Companies no longer want to let you close your account with them and go out of their way to make it a nightmare, like ebay for example. I used my account with them during the initial trial period back in 2007 and never again. I never had any balance with them, as I never used it, and tired of receiving spam mails from them I tried to close my account.

After slogging through several, "Are you sure? It doesn't cost anything to keep your account!", pages I finally hit delete account. Only now they are being petty and charging me a fee for something that was free when the account was opened. Not only do they want me to pay now, they want me to call them and explain why even if I pay the trumped up fee.

There are other sites like coca-cola's little cap redeeming site that won't allow you to close your account either. Another big mistake I've made over the years but I've visited all of these sites and changed my personal info like name and address etc to completely bogus and hilarious things. I even attempted to change the email address to another provider that I haven't mentioned. This is my current problem as none of the confirmation change emails made it. I contacted the support people, who replied initially but have gone silent since. Zero help, so that's a wash.

I'm looking to get away from the corporations that say they never sell my info but then release a statement saying they're doing just that. It's like some bizarre double-talk that they think you're too ignorant to understand or they just don't care. I seriously doubt I could trust these companies even with a paid email service so I won't bother.

I've noticed some activist minded providers popping up but hell, there's no guarantee they'll be there tomorrow. Which would mean I would probably lose the ability to log in or access all of my registered sites using the email address. So, anyone got a recommendation?

For less than $10 you can get a website from hostgator to your liking and just use the e-mail... You can take any domain name that isn't already taken and it's POP rather than web-based like everything you mentioned...though there are ways to get that email through the web.

In other words, pay for a web site with minimal storage but with the account will come some "free" e-mail addresses. And not even have anything at that web address...

I've got a hostgator site right now that I use for my forum but i don't even use the email addresses I could since I'm not unhappy with gmail.

Well a lot has changed since then. I decided to delete my hotmail account and remain with yahoo. I opened a gmail account as well, for my youtube account and my university email is through gmail as well. I guess I'm content for now and haven't had anymore problems since making the move. All of those pushy sites were tied to the hotmail account anyway.