A beginners guide to Yahoo email. (yahoo.com in general)

Member Name: mpeh

Product:	yahoo.com in general
Date:	10/10/01 (847 review reads)
Rating:

Advantages: simple, easy to use, reliable

Disadvantages: red and blue, er, er

When you first want a Yahoo email address you have to find your way onto the register screen. This is relatively simple. Starting from www.yahoo.com the search engine, click on the email link. This takes you to the log in screen where you can log on if you are an existing member or choose to sign up as a new member. When you click on this option you are presented with a screen offering you yet two more choices, very like the screen you get on Dooyo when you choose to write an opinion, only this time instead of short or long you get normal or large. Inbox that is. You can either have a 6mb limit I think, for free, or a super dooper huge massive something which you pay through the nose for. Well actually I'm informed that the rates for the larger inbox capacity are actually quite reasonable. If you are a normal person then you will only need the free one, it'll handle not looking at it for months and then being full of junk and not crash, unlike some email services I could mention- too late Bill boom!

Well after your big choice you are presented with a form to fill out with your details. What your name is, where you live (otherwise known as address) your hobbies interests, national insurance number, criminal record blah blah blah blah. Well actually only the name and address bit is true. There are a lot of other details they want, interests is presented as a check list for you to tick (or click) those that pertain to you but the most important ones are the email address you want, other wise known as your yahoo I.D. and the password you'll use to access it. As with most internet security programs the way they ensure this isn't a problem is by making you fill out your password twice and checking its the same. Clever huh? Your yahoo I.D. will be the name you have to use to sign in every time so either make it something easy to type or make sure the computer you will be using to check your email has a function enabling you to get the login scree
n filled in automatically. You will be sent loads of advertising junk if you don't check the little box at the bottom which says 'I dont want lots of advertising junk email', this is why they want to know your interests so that they can target the adverts to suit you.

Once you've filled this out the chances are you'll get a screen telling you that someone else has your I.D. already. Lets face it there are a million and two people (actually probably more) called Matthew so the chances of me getting matt@yahoo.com or matthew@yahoo.com or somethig similar are, miniscule to worse. And the same goes for you if you have a name not beginning with Z and even then I wouldn't be willing to bet on it. They suggest you put numbers after your name (or whatever it is, you aren't allowed them before) the year for example matthew2001@yahoo.com, or next year. Another way of doing it is using your whole name, like me- matthewhorsham@yahoo.com was available, there obviously aren't too many Matthew Horsham 's out there.

Once you've managed to pick a unique I.D. you get passed on to a slighty altered log in screen which offers you the chance to log in with your new password and account or sod off, as it were.

Let's assume you log in, go on it'll make the review more interesting. This brings you into the account proper and the layout stays the same throughout: The left hand side of your screen becomes a decorated menu with the options; check mail, compose, folders (with a little plus sign gif next to it), search, options, mail add ons, help desk and sign out. At the top there is the option to return to 'mail home'. All of these menu options are links you can merely click on and be whisked to your destination. The right hand side of your screen says welcome 'bla blah bla blah' (i.e. welcome matthewhorsham) and then tells you how much new mail you have received since the last time you checked. (That
should be how many new messages sorry). New mail gets put in your inbox unless yahoo has identified it as general trash and then it gets put in a folder called 'Bulk mail'. If you ever sign up for anything over the internet that requires an email address then you stand a chance of receiving junk. Yahoo filters this quite well and places it in bulk mail for you.

Below this there are the links to your inbox and if you have any, your bulk mail folder. Clicking on either of these takes you to them. Mail is displayed in lists on yahoo, in tabular form: On the left there is a small check box and then there's the sender's name or email address if they don't list a name, then the date it was received on (I think, it may be date received) and then the size in kilobites and finally the title of the email, usually 'blank' or 'Re: '. The title is lit up blue and is a link to read the email itsef. Also on the table are links to delete, check all, clear all, check other mail and empty trash. Basicaly the easy way to do things is to click on the first message in the list, read it, deal with it and then yahoo automatically takes you to the next one.

When you open a message from someone it displays the address of the sender, the adress(es) of those it was sent to and then the main text. You have options to add the address of the sender to your address book (I'll explain in a minute) or to block the address. If you keep getting mail from someone you don't ever want to read mail from again, advertisers, ex boyfriends, whatever, then you can click on this link and yahoo will automatically reject all mail sent to you from that address. Yahoo will store up to 100 addresses to block mail from and after you hit 100 (unlikely and I pity you if you do, that's a whole lot of ex's) then it warns you and offers you the chance to remove one and replace it with the new one you just tried to block.

There are also links
to skip to the next message in your inbox (or whichever folder you're in), return to your inbox, skip to the previous message (if there is one) reply to the message or delete the message. You can also forward the messgae on to others. Delete is fairly obvious, it removes the message and places it in your trash folder. Reply allows you to compose an email and it fills in the address to send it to as the sender's address on the mail you're replying to. Obvious really. There is a button marked reply all. When you get an email from someone and it's been sent to loads of people, if you click this button the email you then write will go to all the people on that address list as well as the original sender.

Forwarding an email message means sending a copy of it to someone else. You can send it as an attachment, an extra file tacked onto the mail you send, or as inline text which just means as if you had copied and pasted the text into your message. Whichever you choose to do you will be able to write extra or alter the text and add addresses to send it to before you send. When you reply to a mail and then press 'send' yahoo gives you options as to what to do with the original message that you received, you can delete it, return to it or skip over it to the next message. Again all of these options are links you merely click on.

When you click on the check mail option on the left hand menu yahoo goes to your inbox and lists any new mail you have received whilst logged in. It also lists messages in your inbox that you haven't deleted. Those that are new are highlighted white, those that are old are shadowed grey.

When you click on compose yahoo sets up a blank email. You type your text in the large box, the addresses of those you wish to send to in the box marked To, a line marked subject to show what is in your mail. When you open your inbox it is this that comes up as the title of the message. There is also a box ma
rked 'cc' which stands for carbon copy and this is another way of sending the message to multiple addresses. To be honest I'm not sure what the difference between sending a mail to an address in the main address line is compared to addresses in the cc box. Sorry.

Once you have typed your message you then have options to save a draft (in a folder called draft), spell check it, send it or cancel it. When you spell check the message is displayed on screen and all the words that Yahoo doesn't recognise are displayed in little boxes with a question mark next to them. You can click on these question marks and make a list of all the words you spell wrong. For instance I consistently type 'the' as 'teh' (as many people who read my unalterable comments on dooyoo will know) and thus I can get it to automatically change all my 'teh's to 'the's. If you see what I mean.

The next link on the main menu is folders. If you click on the word folders then you get a page on the right hand side showing you the folders that exist on your account in a table. Initially these are 'Inbox' 'Draft' 'Bulk mail' 'Sent' and 'Trash'. Trash and bulk mail have a link next to them marked 'empty' if you click on this then Yahoo will delete all the messages in those folders. The table shows how many messages are in each folder, how many of them you haven't read and how much space that folder is taking up. There are options to create new folders with your own names which are then displayed in lesser type below the main folder listing with their details displayed in the same format. You can edit your personal folder names or delete the whole folder completely if you wish. Each folder name is a link and if you click on this it opens the familiar table list of messages with the same details as always.

If you click on the little plus sign gif on the menu on the left hand side, at a
ny point then the main page remains on whatever it was on before, i.e. if you were reading a message then it'll still be displayed but the left hand menu now has a list of your folder names displayed under the 'folders' link. Each is a link and if you click on this it opens the folder in the same way as above.

'Addresses' opens your address book. This again is displayed in tabular form, it shows the names of the people whose addresses you have stored, the address itself and then any extra details you have filled in like their phone nuumber, company name and stuff. Each person has their own individual record which you can access by clicking on their name, you can then edit anything about them by simply typing in the relevant boxes. By clicking on the address you open a new email message with that address chosen to send it to. You can collect the people together as lists. For instance if you have a football team or something then you can group all the players together as a 'list' and call it 'players' or 'football', whatever. Clicking on this results in all the addresses appearing in the To window of the new email. Basically this is just a short cut to make typing and sending emails quicker. Unfortunately Yahoo will only display 25 people in the folder at once, you have options to skip forwards and backwards through the pages of addresses but this can get annoying. Adding someone to your address book is simple, either click the 'add to address book' link that appears when they send you a message or go to your address book and click on the 'add address' link. This results in a page to fill out with details, name, nick name, address etc.

When you are composing a message you can click on the link marked addresses and this will open a new window- a whole new window, with the names of the people and their addresses marked. You can click on the check boxes of all the people you wish to send the ma
il to and then click on the link 'done' and yahoo will fill out all the addresses for you, which is nice.

In address book you can give people nick names and then when composing a message simply type this nick name into the To box. Yahoo will fill out their address for you automatically. You can mix the nick names with normal addresses, separating them with commas just as you separate real addresses. Even better; the nick names don't get displayed to the people you are sending the message to so if you have a name for them which they might object to, they never need know.

In general Yahoo is a very good email system. I have used others but find them not as sturdy as Yahoo. This system has never let me down, the problems have always come from 'the other end' as it were, other peoples email systems. I'd recommend yahoo as a very reliable email program especially for people who just want the simple options- receive email, send email.

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