Hi,
One host I would NOT recommend is 1and1... really slow folder access and crappy support. However, it is cheap and OK-ish if you are willing to put up with a bit of shoddy service (I use them, and they're Ok 90% of the time). The main reason I am still with them is because it is too much hassle to change, plus the one thing they are good at is server side spam filtering (catches all my junk!)
GMail is all well and good but doesn't support IMAP, it only offers POP. That means that your mail won't copy to Sent-Mail (although you COULD use your mail client to BCC all your e-mail to
[email protected] because gmail supports plus-filters), and messages statuses won't be synched amongst GMail or your machine, and you have to always download the entire message, you can't leave off the attachments. As long as none of those are a problem for you, GMail might be a nice option. If you must have IMAP, everyone.net are supposed to be quite good - plus they offer it at a reasonable price. You just point your host's dns settings for your domain to their mx servers and you're set.
Word to the wise, though, if you go for IMAP, don't use Outlook. You shouldn't use Outlook anyway, as it's a horrid mail client that breaks every standard in the book and produces HTML that is plainly grotesque and promotes bad standards (just see
http://dan.mail.info!) - but it's alright on the whole; however, that can't be said of its IMAP support. Its main problem is that it insists on freezing up the whole mail client when it's performing a server-side action (and that could be anything, from updating headers, which can take a LONG time using Outlook if you have lots of mail! - to downloading an attachment that it has decided that you want). And you can't purge messages automatically, so deleting a message with IMAP is inevitably a two-step process - Delete the message, then Edit > Purge Deleted Messages In This Folder, then click Yes to the dialog. Not fun. The final thing with the unholy marriage of IMAP and Outlook is that you are inevitably limited to the size of your mailbox - probably 2GB or something. When that fills up you need to back up your mail, unlike POP where your mailbox folder size is limited only by your hard drive! With Outlook, backing up is an absolute nightmare involving the weird nonsense that is PST files, and it's all very unpleasant and painful. And Outlook won't even do you the honour of copying your mail to Sent (you have to set that up manually as a filter, believe it or not!).
So long story short, Outlook's support for IMAP is flaky at best. Outlook 2007 resolves some of these problems but they are still present to an extent, plus Outlook 2007 is even slower than the 2003 version, and latency with mail clients is the last thing you need - when I was using Outlook, it got to the point where I started dreading checking my e-mail because it would be about 1 minute (i.e. a long time in computer terms!) before anything was accessible. Oh, and did I mention you can't download IMAP messages to your PC properly using Outlook?
If IMAP is the way you're heading, you should use some other mail client - Thunderbird is a good one, with the added bonus of being standards compliant, but even Outlook Express is better in its support for IMAP than its 'big sister'. However, if you're staying with POP, then none of the above problems really apply and Outlook will do your job just fine.
FYI the reason Outlook's support for IMAP is so shoddy is because it is obsessed about Microsoft Exchange Servers - basically Microsoft's idea about how IMAP should work. While it's actually not all that bad (if you ever used Hotmail Outlook Live, you get some idea), very very few servers support it, and those that do want lots of cash (we're talking hundreds here).
Hope that helps you out a bit - I've used IMAP for about 2 years, so if you'd like any more info on the pros/cons of IMAP, just ask
Chris
