Woo hoo, it's Yahoo! (yahoo.com in general)

Member Name: bailey_kipper_uk

Product:	yahoo.com in general
Date:	25/08/08 (65 review reads)
Rating:

Advantages: Everything you need in one place

Disadvantages: There are better sites that focus on one category eg news.

Being from the UK signing up with Yahoo.com maybe wasn't the smartest idea I ever had, however it was 11 years ago when I signed up, I was young and naive. I've mainly used Yahoo.com for the email account that you get, it's a free account that gives you a lot of storage.

It's a webmail service which means that your mailbox is online and as such requires no space on your harddrive, but you have to be online to access your emails.

Setting up the account is easy and you don't need to input too many details to get started. You then get unlimited storage (though I'm sure there would be a limit, as with anything that's unlimited) which is lucky due to the amount of spam I get.

Creating a new email is easy and you can attach up to 10 meg of attachments, double what I can do at work. It's quick and easy to attach attachments such as photos, spreadsheets etc. You can then check the spelling, from a wide variety of languages, and if you then want you can save it as a draft. This will then get stored in your draft folder until you want to send it.

One thing I like about Yahoo Mail is the use of folders. You of course get one for your Inbox, Sent, Spam, Drafts and Trash, but you can also add any number of additional folders, such as for storing family emails, confirmation of order emails, survey invites etc.

The main problem I have these days with Yahoo is spam. The ones that are filtered out aren't a problem, though I do get between 50-80 a day. It's all the ones that get through. There seems to be a very poor spam filter in place. For starters I get emails that are dated in the future, not just slightly but sometimes as much as 20 YEARS. Also there's the usual pen1s, p.e.n.i.s. and so forth. Along with every bank under the sun claiming to have blocked my account. Obviously some do appear real and it's these ones that you need to watch out for even more. There are some that are sent as bait, you open one and then BAM! they know you exist and so send even more.

As mentioned in a review previously, ensure you don't open these or respond in any way. Your bank will never contact you to tell you they have lost your details. If you get one of these and think they might be real then use the website address that you always use in order to access your account rather than an address contained in the email.

Yahoo has improved dramatically over the past year and there are more advanced features in place that should stop a lot of the above problems like having a much bigger blocked email address list. You can now add 500 email addresses to this list, so the message gets delivered straight to spam, however the problem is still that scammers only ever use an email address for 24 hours and then get a new one.

A couple of years ago I set up a Hotmail account and have found I get maybe one bit of spam a week so I have decided to get rid of my Yahoo account once and for all. Though I have now set up a Google mail account. This will be used for entering competitions and any sites that seem like they may end up sending me 'selected 3rd party offers' aka spam.

Yahoo.com as a whole has a whole load of other features, similar to any other major email/broadband provider. Such as chat sites, dating, music streaming, movie news, finance, messenger, games etc. I used the chat sites a long time ago, and back then they were fun, but now they are a lot more moderated and swearing seems to be a big no no, even in the adult rooms.

I also used to use the Fantasy Football (UK Football) it was good but the scores used to take a while to update and then we started to use more specialist sites. That's the problem with Yahoo, it's so big. I've found sites that I much prefer. I've found games sites that have a wider choice and better games, I prefer the BBC or Sky news sites for news, finance, entertainment etc. I again use BBC for movies and sports news. I use MSN Messenger as that's what is on my phone. And the list goes on.

In summary Yahoo is good for having lots of info in one place, the mail system is much improved and it's likely to be with us for a while yet.

Summary: Useful site, improving webmail