Oct 04, 2001 02:29 AM
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Without a doubt, Yahoo are one of the biggest names on the net and their free webmail service is amongst the best to be found. With web based email, you can check your mail from any computer and from anywhere in the world, making it ideal for those who are constantly on the move.
I actually stumbled across Yahoo mail rather late in my surfing career, as I’d been a fairly happy user of Hotmail. But the one thing that impressed me with Yahoo when I set up a test account, was the speed of it’s email service, considerably faster than Hotmail and with just as many features to take advantage of.
The site is displayed clearly and is simplicity itself to navigate and not too choked with advertisements and images. Pages load quickly and you can opt for pages to be loaded either with frames or without, and you can customize the layout of your pages with colours that suit you if the default ones are not to your liking. You can also choose how many messages to be displayed on one page, from 25 right up to 200 and there are a number of other options you can use to personalize your mail account.
Yahoo allow you a 6MB inbox totally free of charge or you can increase this if you are willing to pay for the privilege, currently $19.99 for 25MB. You can also choose to import or export your yahoo mail through Outlook Express and the instructions for setting this up are very straightforward. You can set up additional folders for your mail and Yahoo offer you a mail filtering service, so that mails from advertisers, spammers etc bypass your inbox and are stored in your ‘bulk mail’ folder which are then automatically deleted after 30 days.
Other features are available for you to take advantage of. You are supplied with an address book where you can store a variety of information including names, nicknames, company names, telephone numbers, Yahoo IDs and email addresses. You can also use the built in calendar feature to store important events and dates and choose to have reminders sent to you by email to your chosen address (this doesn’t have to be your Yahoo email addie). You can also opt to have a daily view of your calendar emailed to you. Lastly, there is a Notepad feature where you can set up individual folders to store information and general notes.
If you are a user of the Yahoo Instant Messenger program, you can access it directly from your mail account and if you like greetings cards, Yahoo offer their own range of virtual cards for every occasion, all of which can be accessed easily through a link on every mail page. The site also offers you your very own ‘briefcase’ which will store up to 25MB of information and files, ideal if you are on the move and want to access important files from different computers.
Overall, Yahoo mail is one of the best and fastest free web mail services currently on offer and reliability is superb. I have very rarely had any difficulty accessing my mail, unlike with Hotmail which seems to break down all too frequently! I’d recommend this one to everybody.
