How come they got this one right? (talk21.com)

Member Name: dave27

Product:	talk21.com
Date:	29/06/01 (395 review reads)
Rating:

Advantages: Reliable, Functional, SMS

Disadvantages: Standard stuff

Bureaucratic Tendencies ... Barely Tenable ... Bloody Terrible ...Badly Turned Out ... Beautifully Tense ... Boringly Turgid ... Benefits Tiny ... Bodged-up Tools ... Buncha T***s ... Bendy Toes (eh?) ... Whatever!!! We've all got our views about BRITISH TELECOM and they're almost universally critical these days. Mrs D and I are as very unimpressed as anyone in this regard, but there is one offering in the BT stable which is difficult to fault, and that's the Talk21 free e-mail service.

This is BT's contribution altruistically to the government's desire to get the UK on line and the 21 in the name refers to the 21st century apparently. For a free e-mail service, Talk21 is an amazingly strong offering. It offers almost 5Mb of web space for storing the messages and there's a pretty unique filtering function which allows you to send off junk mail to a trash can or alternatively send all messages from an individual e-mail account into a designated folder, which is a pretty neat trick.

Another nice add in is the neat SMS text messaging service which allows you to send up to 160 characters to a mobile telephone. The message will always include your e-mail address at the start and though this is unlikely to be a facility you want to make too much use of, it's certainly a great deal cheaper than the normal cost of sending a text message from your portable phone.

My own experience with Talk21 dates back two or three years to when I first became an Internet user. It was the first e-mail facility which I used and I always found it extremely safe and reliable, though it didn't sport many of the features like SMS back then. As I used BTInternet as my flat rate ISP, the e-mail service was completely free.

Talk21 can be used as either a web based e-mail or via Outlook Express POP3 - when I started up I wanted to use OE for everything, but over recent months I've become much more sold in to the benefits o
f a web based service. The fact that Talk21 is superb for either avenue is a great benefit.

All told, Talk21 is about as good a free e-mail service as I've seen anywhere, although I tend to use my aol account as my main one of choice. Talk21 is a useful backup, although I haven't made that much use of it, if truth be told.

You access your account via the web site www.talk21.com and it's extremely functional and effective if a little basic. It doesn't particularly impress as a portal, but then you're not using it for its portal, are you? It's also a bit clicky and doesn't move very quickly between the various sections. It's not exactly intuitive, although you will quickly get used to it.

Signing up for your free Talk21 account is surprisingly easy and takes only a couple of minutes and you're up and running almost immediately. The help function on the site and the instructions are thorough and very user friendly and they will walk you through tasks such as setting Outlook Express to receive your Talk21 messages. The filtering function is a bit more complex and I have to admit it scared me off and I never bothered getting round to it but then (as Mrs D always says) I'm a lazy git.

You can integrate the service with a WAP enabled phone (although I've always been extremely wary of going down that particular route), and you can set things up such that a text message is sent to your phone whenever an incoming e-mail message has been received in your Inbox. Now that is useful, although I can imagine it would get extremely irritating if you get loads and loads of e-mails to your account. I guess you need to be selective about who has the address in order to get the best use of this particular function.

I'm certainly not going to clue Mrs D in to the facility because she'd soon start nagging me to let her have a mobile phone and the bills would really start to go through
the roof at that point.

Okay, summarising things down, I hate to admit it, but Talk21 is a pretty neat service with few of the service problems you normally associate with the initials BT. It's fast and reliable. For example, when I sent my first text message to my mobile phone to test it, it was delivered virtually instantly. There's easily enough storage space unless you are one of those hoarders that never deletes anything. I've been used to some quite lengthy delays with a lot of free e-mail services, so I was extremely pleased with that. I've also not experienced ANY system down periods so far, although, as I've already said, I haven't been that heavy a user of the account. It is substantially better than the BTInternet e-mail account I used to 'enjoy' which would never allow me to take messages via the web site account - I could only get at my messages via Outlook Express and unless you completed the download of the full contents of your Inbox then they would stay cluttering up your account. This can be hell if you go away on holiday if you've got a particularly heavy e-mail account and you can soon be rendered a slave to the machine.

Happily Talk21 doesn't suffer from such drawbacks and I have to say that it's highly recommended if you want a good basic e-mail account that won't let you down.

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