E-xcellent Mail (hotmail.com)

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Product:	hotmail.com
Date:	30/06/02 (72 review reads)
Rating:

Advantages: Free, Web based, can be accessed from anywhere

Disadvantages: Sometimes slow

Just recently, I decided I needed my own personal e-mail account. I have always used our family one, but circumstances dictated that I ought to get a private account of my own. It was also looking possible that I might end up moving house shortly, so I decided a web-based mail account would be just the ticket.

I didn’t really look around very much. I went straight to Hotmail and signed up.

But why Hotmail? Well, they are the most well-known web-based e-mail providers. And the service is free. Plus, a lot of my friends use MSN for Instant Messaging, and you have to have a Hotmail account to use MSN. So, that made the choice easy.

I popped along to the website at www.hotmail.com and signed up. It was a simple job to register. All I had to do was click on “register for a free e-mail account”, choose a name for my account, add my name and address, choose a password and a secret question for security reasons, and I was away! Easy peasy. Far easier than I expected.

Be warned, by the way, that Hotmail is currently pushing its premium paid-for service. For £19.99 a year, they offer the same e-mail account, but with extra storage space and the opportunity to send and receive larger attachments.

My sister went to sign up for a free e-mail account, didn’t read the instructions properly, and ended up signing up for this deal. Once you’ve agreed to it, you can’t cancel.

I’ve had a look at what she gets for her twenty quid a year, and it isn’t much. You get an extra 8 meg of e-mail storage (I don’t keep much mail anyway, and if I wanted to keep it, I could save it to my hard drive as a text file). You also get the ability to send files up to 1.5meg instead of 1meg as attachments (not a problem for me and certainly not worth £20 a year to me at the moment). Plus there is extra communities storage, but I wouldn’t have use for that either. And, you get f
ree virus scanning of all e-mail and attachments, but I use my own anti-virus software, so that isn’t an issue for me either.

I don’t know at this stage whether her paid for account will be any more stable, quick or reliable than my free one, or whether they use separate servers for paying clients. Time will tell.

So, how is my Hotmail account working? I’ve been using it for a couple of months now and I have to say I am well chuffed. For a free service, it’s fab.



******The Upside******

~Privacy~
I’ve never had a private e-mail account of my own before, so I like it very much. I can sign up for stuff without getting it in the neck from ‘im indoors.

I can do private stuff without risk of it being seen by the rest of the family ;o). And I can get my Ciao and Dooyoo alerts on my own account so I don’t get moaned at for the dozens of e-mails I get!

~Flexibility~
I’m in the process of getting a divorce at the moment and will have to move home, though goodness knows where I will be going at the moment! Luckily, I can access my Hotmail account from anywhere…..from a friend’s house, from the cybercafe down the street, or from the library.

This is because Hotmail is “web-based” email and not tied to an address and a particular computer like other types of e-mail account. So I need never be out of touch with my online friends. This is a huge comfort to me in these uncertain times.

Hotmail also seems to handle the volume of mail I get via Ciao and Dooyoo alerts (and the hyperlinks to opinions and comments work well enough too, if a little slowly, so that’s a bonus – take heed Dooyoo, when are you going to provide hyperlinked alerts then?).

~Free of Charge~
My Hotmail account costs me nothing. How cool is that! Even as a poor single parent, I will be able to have access to e-mail wi
thout having to pay a subscription fee to an ISP. And if I use the free internet service at the library, I wouldn’t have to pay for a connection, either. Ahhh, progress.

~Features~
Hotmail has a lot of features for a free service. I get to send and receive e-mails and attachments (as long as they aren’t too big). I get to save my e-mails to the server for access later (provided I don’t go over my storage quota). At the moment I am only using 7 per cent of my allotted storage capacity. I get to set up my own folder system for keeping my e-mails tidy, and to keep copies of outgoing e-mails. I can even block certain senders if they are giving me trouble and filter the kind of mail I receive. And I can have multiple accounts if I choose to. That in itself is pretty amazing for nowt!

But wait…..I also get MSN, and this is my favourite part. I get a free Instant Messenger program that allows me to see when my friends are online and talk to them for free! How cool is that.

MSN is brilliant. It is so easy to use. You just fire it up and it tells you which of your contacts are on line, whether they are “away” or “busy” or up for a chat. You can invite people to join your contacts list, or other people can invite you, by using their Hotmail e-mail address.

Not only can I “type” messages, but recently, with use of a microphone and headphones, I had a spoken conversation with someone at the other end of the country – for free! It was easy to set up, and apart from a bit of a time lag, it was brilliant.

Just be sure to tell the person you are chatting with to use headphones and not speakers – there’s nothing more annoying than hearing your own horrid voice coming back at you through their speakers and microphone! It’s a nasty shock, hearing yourself, isn’t it? I never knew I sounded so much like Donald Duck!

******The
Downside******

~Spam~
When I signed up, a lot of people told me I’d get spammed like crazy on Hotmail. Since writing this opinion lots of people have said they get loads of spam. I can’t say that I’ve experienced that, to be honest, and if I get unsolicited mail, I just delete it, so I don’t find that a problem. Hotmail does provide mail filters if you can be bothered to set them up. But my experience of Hotmail has been relatively spam-free.

~Porn~
People told me Hotmail is porn heaven and that I’d get acres and acres of porn. That hasn’t been my experience either. I had one mail from a porn site – I set up the filters Hotmail provide, blocked the sender and haven’t had a problem since. Maybe they just think I’m too boring to get porn!

~Speed~
OK, so Hotmail isn’t the fastest service in the world. The site is quite slow moving and sometimes, even with our broadband connection, it takes a while to access your mailbox. So what, Hotmail is free!

Sometimes, mail takes a while to get through, or seems to get “stuck” in cyberspace for a while before popping up. That happens with snail mail too you know. So what, Hotmail is free!

You quite often get “this page not available” messages and have to refresh. This can be really annoying if you’ve just finished a huge long opus of a mail and tried to send it, and it’s got lost. Well, save drafts, or write in Word and cut and paste. It’s not a big deal. After all, Hotmail is free!

There have been one or two rumours around that Hotmail won’t stay free and that eventually charges will be levied for Hotmail accounts or use of MSN. Well, what will be will be. I will have to look again at how valuable it is to me if that occurs, and analyse what the service would be worth to me if I have to pay.

Until then, I am happy to use my Hotmail
accounts (I’ve just signed up for a couple more!) I know it can be slow and annoying at times, but, all together now, HOTMAIL IS FREE, and what do you expect to get for nothing these days!

In my experience and my opinion, Hotmail is a very useful addition to my computer lifestyle. Other people haven't had the same experience, I know, but I suppose I've been lucky. I only have my own experience to go on.


Cheers for reading!

Allie xx

© ajools 2002

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