email

Places like Hotmail and Yahoo have free email services you can use. You also might try going to Google (www.google.com) and typing "free email" in the search box.

(Is that the right answer?)

I have both hotmail and yahoo emails and I prefer yahoo. You can sign up for it by putting "yahoo email" in your search box. It's also free.

Welcome to A2K :-D

http://mail.yahoo.com is the link to sign up for yahoo. It's probably the best free provider left out there. If you don't have to have it free, try getting your own domain name. . . you can usually pay 15-20 bucks for a year and get 25 megabytes of storage space to divide up as you like, which is usually adequate, especially if you couple it with an email program like outlook express.

A note: Yahoo mail does NOT work with outlook express- you have to read mail from their website, and you can only save, I believe, 3 megabytes for each account. If you receive a lot of big emails, that'll go fast.

My favorite free email provider is MyWay. They offer more space (6MB) than Yahoo or Hotmail, faster page load times, and no banner ads or popups.

Monger, can you POP it?

No. You can, however, set it up to check external pop accounts.

Yahoo and other services offer a people search function, jack, but you will probably end up callling and asking for their addresses.

For email services, I can't say much. I've used Yahoo mail from the beginning with surprisingly few problems. You can access it from anywhere there is an internet connection, like public libraries. This has been an important feature to me on two occasions, one of them quite recently.

I have Hotmail. How is Yahoo better?

I've always found hotmail a little annoying, especially the lack of space and the deleting your emails. . .

I've got, well, way too many e-ddresses. Hotmail seems to let amazing amounts of junk through their filters, whereas my Yahoo and MyWay accounts are still clean as whistles. I haven't had a single piece of spam in my Yahoo email in nearly 4 years of use.

Wow, lucky you, Beth. . . after the Abuzz email list got public, that account became worthless. . . the spam filters on Yahoo are EXCELLENT. . . nothing ever gets into my main mailbox. . . but I get 50 or 60 spam mails a day.

There's a lesson for you. . . no matter which you choose, guard your email address like your financial info. . . or risk a world of annoyance. . .

I cannot say, Wy. As I say, I started with Yahoo email and never had a reason to change, so no basis for comparison.

Hotmail has a very irritating way of dealing with email, but I consider hotmail superior because they allow access by Outlook Express. I hated Hotmail with a passion till Yahoo terminated POP access. Then I moved my free accounts over to Hotmail.

MyWay is a gimmick to me and I hate them, but their pages are clean. Yahoo has the best web mail..

But all of that is moot to me, I only care about POP and email reader access so that I don't have to visit their sites.

Hmm, I don't know much about MyWay's dealings, I've just been recommending them to people for a little while now because of the extra space & lack of adds (at least blatant ones). But for myself, the only free email accounts I use are from hotmail, for the reason Craven mentioned...connecting through Outlook Express.

Doesn't anyone here get an address provided by their ISP? I've got 2 from my ISP, one that's part of the plan and a second one that I pay an extra $10 a year for. I've also got a hotmail account as backup, and a uni address. Like Craven I also used yahoo until they stopped POP access free. Didn't know I could get hotmail POP access.

I recommend strongly against using ISP mail. Because when you change ISPs you lose your address.

I've been with the same ISP for about 4 years now. Can't imagine any reason to change.

Crave, what's the deal with Myway?

On a minor technical note, Outlook Express doesn't use POP to connect to Hotmail. It's done in a weird way which doesn't allow you full control over some folders (for example you've got zero control over the MSN Annoncements folder it sets up), but overall it works just fine.