Mail, MSN and Million Dollar Legacies! (hotmail.com)

Member Name: stoffy

Product:	hotmail.com
Date:	17/01/03 (417 review reads)
Rating:

Advantages: easy to use and navigate around, very fast, dictionary, thesaurus and spellcheck facilities

Disadvantages: SPAM...

Viagra, porn and million dollar legacies of a Nigerian dynasty, all killed in a mysterious plane crash. No, not an episode of ‘Footballers Wife’, this is the contents of my junk mail filter on my Hotmail account, the contents of which I stumble upon every morning.

Possibly the world’s most popular e-mailing site, Hotmail has a (just) reputation for attracting SPAM left, right and centre. However, it remains my tool of choice for e-mail...

Users can sign up for a new Hotmail account free of charge by clicking on the appropriate link well displayed on the hotmail.com homepage. After answering a few personal details (including postcode and occupation, arguably irrelevant you may think...), you are asked to choose a username. Unfortunately, due to the millions of users, you are probably going to struggle to claim your first choice initially, although by cleverly adding numbers or underscores, you can usually pick-up a variation of it. You also have to enter a password of choice, at an unusually long minimum of eight characters. However, for the amnesiacs amongst us, there is an option to remind you of your password should you forget it. There is also a registration check to prevent any abuse of this sign-up system.

Initially, you are given 2MB of space in your account. Whilst not as generous as the default 6MB given to Yahoo Mail users, I find it more than enough for my means. For £20 a year, it is possible to upgrade your account. This gives you 10MB of space, and is more suitable for people whose inbox mostly consists of images rather than text-based mails. If you run out of space, there is the danger of you not receiving e-mails anymore until you have created some room for them to go in. However, after logging-on, a green (or red) bar is displayed above the text telling you how many new mails you have, demonstrating how much of your allocated space if taken-up. This gives you plenty of warning that you need to
delete or move some of your inbox.

Once you’ve signed-up, logging on is straightforward and painless. There is also the option to state if you are on a public computer, to ensure that your details disappear as soon as you leave the site. If you don’t choose this option, and you or someone else goes back onto the Hotmail homepage after you have initially surfed away, your address (although obviously not password) will be displayed which might not be particularly desirable...

Without going into the obvious features of any e-mail account in too much depth, you have an inbox as well as an option to show messages that you have sent or one’s that you have deleted less than 24 hours previously which reside in the trashcan. You also have the option to create a second inbox for ‘junk mail’ (see below...). The inbox displays the sender, title, as well as the date the e-mail was sent and the size of them. This is always useful to know as you can choose to delete the e-mails which are taking up the most space. You can also see whether the item has been read yet. On top of this, there is also the facility to create folders for ease of retrieving e-mails that you want to save.

Composing an e-mail couldn’t be simpler, and there is also the facility to remember the names of people you are sending the e-mail too, so you don’t have to keep on typing in the same long addresses. Your full address book can be displayed and edited accordingly by clicking on a link displayed on your inbox page. There are also useful features on the composition page such as the spell-check, dictionary and thesaurus, all of which are also available at your finger-tips.

As mentioned before, Hotmail accounts seem to suffer more from junk mail than most other Web based mail-sites. Whilst usually easily spottable anyway (“SEE MY NKKD PIX!!!!” from Hester0302043032 isn’t going to be a quick ‘hello, ho
w are you’ from your Aunt Sybil is it?), adding a junk filter can make life a bit easier when trying to separate the chaff from the wheat.

The free filter automatically puts any correspondence sent to multiple addresses in this separate folder. Whilst no exactly infallible, it does tend to weed most of it out. The other side-effect of the filter is that it initially classifies any mailing lists you’re on or other desirable circular e-mails as junk. However, it is possibly to reset these addresses and mailing groups as being ‘friendly’ ones, meaning that any subsequent e-mails from these will go straight into your inbox and never into your junk filter. You also have the option of ‘blocking’ the address that junk mail has come from, although sadly, this doesn’t seem to stop the endless stream of unwanted loan offers and holiday deals that comes through.

Admittedly, all of this (mostly American-based) junk, much of it pornographic, is the biggest incentive not to sign up to Hotmail. It also means that parents should probably encourage their children who want to have e-mail accounts to try another provider.

That notwithstanding, Hotmail is still my Web-based mail of choice on the basis that it’s easy to use and is extremely fast. The site is well presented, with its easy to read blue and white background and black fonts. Navigation is also straightforward, and there are no aspects of the site’s design that you can fault it on. There are also direct links to other MSN features, which I won’t go in depth on in this e-mail review other than to say that it’s a quick way of getting news whilst checking your inbox at the same time.

All in all, Hotmail comes highly recommended, although just remember to set your junk mail filter and to ignore those Nigerian e-mail scams!

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