Relight my fire... (email.angelfire.com)

Member Name: Belfastgirl

Product:	email.angelfire.com
Date:	23/05/01 (260 review reads)
Rating:

Advantages: Less Spam

Disadvantages: Mail sometimes "bounces"

I have used Angelfire for about 2 years now, as an extra email address initially and then as a main one after I found that someone had been accessing my Hotmail account (what a nice person they were).

Angelfire provides a free, web based email service, quite similar to Hotmail, except I haven't had the same problem with getting spam. Angelfire is run by Lycos, a well known name on the web.

One problem I am going to point out right at the start is that on occasions Angelfire's server goes down, so meaning that emails "bounce" leaving people thinking that your email account is not working or that your inbox is full. I first found this out when I noticed some missing emails from a yahoo group that I am in, the Yahoo site was able to tell me that due to "no response" from Angelfire (I'm assuming this is down-time) they were unable to send my emails to me.

It is fairly easy to sign up to Angelfire. One thing that I like about Angelfire is that it is easier to obtain the user name that you wish to have (if it's important to you), as there are fewer people that have signed up here than for example Yahoo or Hotmail.

When you sign up to Angelfire you will get yourname@angelfire.com and 4MB of storage space - 2MB more than Hotmail.

When you sign up you are asked to provide a username and password, similar to other web based accounts. They then ask you for some personal information. Some of these fields are mandatory.

Then you can click sign up and that should be you!

When you sign in, you will be taken to a page that tells you how many new email messages you have. Clicking on this will take you to your inbox. Upon arriving at your inbox, any new messages that you have will be highlighted using a dark bold blue link in the subject line. To the left of this will be the person who sent the mail's name, and to the right of the subject you will find the date and the size o
f the message.

Clicking on the dark blue link takes you to the email.

At the top of this page there is various options :

Inbox - as described befroe
Send Mail - where you can compose you own emails
Address Book - where you can store email adresses
Folders - you can organise your email in various folders to keep thing tidy
Check other Email - this account lets you set up POP accounts from other email servers.
Options - this allows you to block spam (YAY!), edit your message controls, write your own signature to attach to emails, have an auto reply if you are not going to be able to access your emails for a while just to let people know, account information and details on how to subscribe to their newsletters.

In all, I think Angelfire offers as much as some of the other big web based email providers do, without the spam of Hotmail! The only problem is the downtime of the site.. which is actually a big downside as you tend to lose emails - not a good thing if you are expecting something important!

Summary: