# email security: GMail vs paid ISP email addresses



## RedSwirl (Feb 7, 2007)

In the next few weeks here it seems like I'm going to be switching ISPs, and one major affect of this is that I'm going to lose my ISP email address. It's been my primary email for pretty much my whole adult life and as such I have it tied to probably dozens of accounts and passwords and whatnot.

When switching them all over, I'm thinking about just switching a lot of them to GMail, but I don't know if it's generally considered more or less safe than the email addresses ISPs usually give you. I have two-factor on my GMail but not on my current ISP email.


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## Corday (Mar 3, 2010)

There's no difference in safety although a double sign in is a good idea. Compromised Email is usually carelessness on the users part. Select a secure password.


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## pcride (Jan 29, 2016)

Depends on the ISP and how they manage the security. A local no name/small name ISP might not have all the best practices in place of some of the larger ones like Comcast, road runner, cox etc... GMAIL is always a safe bet, I've had the same address since Google started email and MS bought hotmail!

The concern you should have is privacy and I've found that MS is probably the least intrusive and gmail will take and read our email but all companies do this now days. Are they going to log into your account and read your email , probably not unless they have a reason to but all of our emails is scanned, parsed, aggregated and analyzed.

And don't worry because the NSA will scan everyone's emails... each ISP or provider has their privacy policy you can read.


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## Deleted 03/18/17 (Feb 7, 2017)

I would suggest going with Gmail or someone else besides a ISP email carrier. First. having a ISP email means you have complication every time you move or change carrier. Second, most ISP in the US are now outsourcing their email to outsourced groups or soon will be. This includes Verizon, Cox, and Comcast. Not only is this a security issue, since your email traffic is now going over the public internet, but it's a privacy issue as well since in most case the outsourced group's ToS is not clear. Who knows who they can sell your email address to or how their spam filters work. Finally, I don't know of a single ISP email carrier that can meet Gmail's performance. I think it has only been down once in he 10+ years I have used it. The main downside to gmail is that their support is almost non-existent. You have to join a crappy forum then wait weeks for a answer. Not something I expect from one of the largest email providers in the world, but like everything else, it comes down to profit margins.


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