~ ~ In the six years or so since I got wired to the old World Wide Web I’ve had dozens of email addresses, with all sorts of different email providers.
In common with most folks, I suppose my first was with Outlook Express, the free email service from Microsoft that seems to come packaged with every Microsoft Windows system.

~ ~ Now the mad cabbie wasn’t born yesterday, and even as an Internet “novice” had the nonce to realise that nothing in this life comes for free, and all such Spam emails were immediately deleted.
But after a while, and after I had accidentally deleted a few genuine emails from friends or business associates, this Spam rubbish really started to get up my nose.
I did have a good email service for a while, with “Ireland.com”, the website of the Irish Times newspaper, but then they stopped offering the service free, and charging ludicrous sums of money to even access their website. (Even for someone who writes for the newspaper on the odd occasion! Sod that for a lark!)

inmyopinion.co.uk (there’s a good one for all us writers!)

capitalist.co.uk (for all you would be entrepreneurs)

OK. That’ll do. I think you’ve probably got my drift.
There’s an ‘A to Z’ and a search facility so you can trawl through all the available names at your leisure. And as I said, there are thousands to choose from.

~ ~ Another useful facility that I use is the file store.
Here you can store up to 5Mb of files, and it’s very handy to be able to send any attachments you receive here. You can then scan them with whatever virus checker you use before you open them, just in case it contains one of those nasty wee viruses that seem to be forever doing the rounds using email.
You have all the other usual facilities that you get with most email providers.
There’s an address book for storing all the email addys of your contacts, and here you can simply click on their name (or names for multiple emails) and be taken directly to the “compose an email” box.
Another section that is useful is the “overview”. Here you will be told how much of your storage facility you have used up, and how many active email addresses you are currently using.
A tiny wee box at the top of the page keeps you updated with how many days you have left until your subscription expires. This is useful, as I would have most likely have forgotten to renew mine on time about a month or so ago if it hadn’t been for this.

~ ~ I’m not going to describe the site layout and home page in detail, as anybody who’s interested enough can simply go and take a wee look for themselves. You know the old saying; a picture is better than a thousand words.
One thing I will mention is the page colour.
You can select what background colour you want your inbox to be, or, if you’re like me and like being surprised, you can set this to “random selection”, and get a different coloured page every time you log on. (it’s fun)
You won’t be bombarded with on-page advertising either. There area few banner ads right enough, but they’re not particularly intrusive, and you don’t get any of those damn pop-ups.