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The Kitchen Table

Another email question

13 years ago

Does anyone have a free email provider that does not require you to supply your cell phone number? My number is my number. I try not to give it out to anyone who doesn't need it. I need to switch to a different email provider.

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Comments (15)

User
13 years ago
I've never given my phone number for any account. If I had to I would make one up!
Try the free aol for you email.
ravencajun Zone 8b TX
13 years ago
It is not required you can by pass that stage in the set ups there is usually a very small option on that page that says skip or something like that. I have gmail, hotmail, yahoo, and others and have never ever given my phone number. It is just an optional way for them to contact you should they suspect your account has been hacked or someone other than you is trying to get into your account. I have set it up with an alternate email address so they can send me an email to another account to alert me.
If you did add your phone number you can go into the settings for the account and remove it, not advised to create a fake number you don't want them sending your info to a phone number that may belong to someone.
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Jane - good question. I know I can use AOL free mail. It seems to me that this summer/early fall, I kept finding issues with AOL email - and several web-savvy people (like my web designer, etc. suggested that AOL is very troublesome in it's efforts to be helpful. Now I'm having trouble remembering why I was getting so frustrated with AOL. This is what I do recall. Not always being able to view embedded images (including an email blast from a non-profit I'm on the Board of). Difficulty formatting emails - if I cut and paste word documents in the email, it gets deliverd with all kinds of extraneous punctuation and symbols. I've had neighborhood listservs reject some of my postings bc. AOL sent so much gibberish with it. I had to rewrite it to get it sent to these neighborhood yahoo-group listservs in a format that was clear. I think (I could remember this wrong), that if I use AOL's fonts, colors, formatting - it may not get delivered that way. Now I'm opening AOL mail through the firefox browser and not using AOL software. I have found that the search function is vastly inferior to the search function if I opened AOl software. Having AOL email open in Firefox, the searching for emails is highly inaccurate - to the point of being almost useless. This is probably the single biggest frustration I have with AOL (now that I"m not using their software). I don't know that it would work any better if I used the free AIM instead of opening my AOL mail in Firefox. Not quite sure if and how AIM is different. Using AOL mail via Firefox - it just handles my emails badly. It will place emails in my old folder when I've marked them as save as new. I seem to have less control over where I save my emails. It seems to almost randomly decide whether it keeps the email in the new inbox - or places it in the old folder (where it eventually disappears). And I can only access old emails for a short period before they're deleted. And the recently deleted seem available for a tiny, tiny time compared with the AOL software. Jane - if your experience with AOL mail is different, please let me know. I know that it's just been very cumbersome and un-useful since I switched to Firefox this summer. Another problem -which may not be AOL, but could be firefox - or who knows what else. If I'm looking on craigslist and I want to inquire about an item for sale, I can't manage to reply to the poster. I hit the "reply to" button, it places that poster's anonymous contact info in the to: field - but when I hit send, it says that I can't send mail with parenthesis in the BCC field. I have not added anything in the BCC field - and if I click bcc field and delete everything in it, it still insists there are parenthese in the field and won't send the email. Gee - now that I start thinking about it, I guess I can recall all the frustrations I've been having with AOL (not using the AOL software). The reason I haven't cancelled my paid AOL account is bc. I still need to resort to going through AOL software to reliably access and search old emails. I will keep a free AOL account with my current email address - just so I can be reached by anyone I forgot to inform about my new address. And for those who forget and send to the old. I still want to receive those emails. But my hope is to use it less and less often bc. it's troublesome now. A different reason for not using AOL for my professional email is that it just doesn't look professional. (I presume that's one reason your husband using gmail for his professional correspondence - it's just more professional and less amateurish seeming to clients/customers.) not2bright- I appreciate the FWIW addition. It's a little over my head - but not completely. I do have a professional website - which my webdesigner set up to forward my emails to me. I'm not quite ready for setting up my personal email like this, but the more I hang out on this forum, the more I'm willing to attempt things that I once thought were not possible. Lynn.
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Elmer J Fudd
13 years ago
If you're signing up with one of the well-known, mainstream sites, I wouldn't worry about supplying your phone number. They're not going to badger you or disclose your personal information to a third party.

If anyone has ever had a different experience, I'd like to hear about it - I've never heard of anyone having such a problem.
OklaMoni
13 years ago
Gmail wants my phone number, but it doesn't get it from me. :)

If push comes to shove, I will tell them I don't have one.

Moni
monica_pa Grieves
13 years ago
I've been asked, but I leave it blank.
LuAnn_in_PA
13 years ago
I have four different accounts - hotmail, yahoo, verizon and gmail.
NONE have my phone number.
angelaid
13 years ago
None of mine have my phone number either. A window pops up asking for it once in a while, but I just close it and move on.
User
Original Author
13 years ago
this is to create a new account. Yahoo says it is mandatory.
susanjf_gw
13 years ago
I ignore aol's request all the time...
golfergrrl
13 years ago
I have Yahoo like a zillion others and they don't have
my phone number.
pudgeder
13 years ago
I don't put my phone number out there either.
If they insist, make it up.
kathi_mdgd
13 years ago
I have gmail Yahoo outlook express and hot mail.None of them have my phone number nor will I give it if asked.I'll just say I don't have one.I. rarely ever even use it;just carry it for emergencies.
Kathi
kathi_mdgd
13 years ago
I have gmail Yahoo outlook express and hot mail.None of them have my phone number nor will I give it if asked.I'll just say I don't have one.I. rarely ever even use it;just carry it for emergencies.
Kathi
rob333 (zone 7b)
13 years ago
I make it up and I have an alternate email instead.

Businesses ask for it all the time. It's funny to see the look on their faces when I say 234-5678. Unlisted phone number seems to have slipped out of people's vernacular. For a long time, I'd say "unlisted" and cashier would barely bat an eye, then skip it. Say it and now and I may as well have said I have corn in my socks.

My favorite was the time I almost got into a fight with the cashier whom I had just told I was so glad to finally be able to afford what I was buying because it'd literally been years since I bought what was in my hands. Her big talking point, they wanted it to offer me sale prices. Really? For something I buy once every three or so years and wouldn't be needing again since I just bought one!? No thanks.
ravencajun Zone 8b TX
13 years ago
Making up a phone number when creating your email account is not a good idea since they use that number to contact you should there be an attack on your account or if you lost your info and they needed to resend it to you, they would be sending it to a phone number you can not reach to get that info and it could be someones actual phone number and they would be the one that got your critical information. You can instead give an alternate email address that is real where they can send you that information.

I had that very thing happen recently with my gmail account, I accessed my account from an unknown, to them, device from a different state and it sent out an alert wanting to know if it was really me or if someone was trying to access my account. It was sent to my other email address that I provided, I was able to simply let them know it was me and it was a device I would be using. Had I provided my phone number they would have put out an automated call or text stating the same thing.
There is an option to just skip that page and go on. Not everyone has a cell phone. Not everyone has texting. I believe that you can put in the phone number and request a call not text, then when you go into your account settings you can go in and remove the phone number, if it was set for text that option is not available or that is how it has been in the past for gmail.

I set up a new yahoo account not long ago for one of my neighbors and was able to do so with out a cellphone because she does not have a cell phone. Yahoo has however been making so many changes and many are not for the better so it could have changed. So many people have left yahoo due to some of these changes.

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