http://altavista.iname.com

This is an opinion on http://mail.altavista.com and http://mail.altavista.co.uk

I wanted a webmail account in order to set up an identity for an online game I was playing. I thought I'd try something other than hotmail so when I came across altavista's free webmail service I thought I'd try that.

I started off at mail.altavista.com (so my address was dogscoff@altavista.com) - Setting up my account was very easy, with ...
...running in just a few minutes. Sending and reading mail is easy, even with attachments, and it has some neat features- you can store your favourite addresses and have them on a drop down menu when composing mails. I was also impressed by the power and ease of use of the filtering feature - it's easy to split your incoming mail up by having it automatically searched for certain text in the subject, sender, message or by other criteria. You can then ... more

This is an opinion on http://mail.altavista.com and http://mail.altavista.co.uk

I wanted a webmail account in order to set up an identity for an online game I was playing. I thought I'd try something other than hotmail so when I came across altavista's free webmail service I thought I'd try that.

I started off at mail.altavista.com (so my address was dogscoff@altavista.com) - Setting up my account was very easy, with a minimum of personal details required. I was up and running in just a few minutes. Sending and reading mail is easy, even with attachments, and it has some neat features- you can store your favourite addresses and have them on a drop down menu when composing mails. I was also impressed by the power and ease of use of the filtering feature - it's easy to split your incoming mail up by having it automatically searched for certain text in the subject, sender, message or by other criteria. You can then have each message deleted / forwarded / moved accordingly.

Thy'll store >3 megs worth of mail for you, and site access was fast and uncluttered, so I was very happy with the service. The only compromise was the little promotional message which is automatically added to the end of every outgoing mail, which seems like a fair trade to me. My browser even remembered my password between visits, which was nice.

Then something odd happened - mail.altavista.com disappeared! Completely. 404 site not found. This was about 2 weeks ago and I have not been able to log in since. Mail is not being forwarded from the account so I can only assume that the whole service is completely dead. I was annoeyd, to say the least. However, my game was still going on and I needed a webmail address, so I went to mail.altavista.co.uk instead - I signed up as dogscoff@altavista.co.uk and have been using that ever since. The service is almost exactly the same and so I am perfectly satisfied again. However I am plagued by paranoia that this service will one day disappear as well...

(Edit: sorry, they give you just over 3 megs of space, not 15 megs as I originally said)

(Another edit: You do get the drop down list on the .co.uk site - you have to mark addresses as "quicklist" to see it.)

(Another edit? Why not. mail.altavista.com is back up and running as if nothing ever happened. All my mail was still there, and it had received all the mssages sent to it while I couldn't get in. I now have two webmail accounts=-)

(Final edit: Even the .com service is dead now. I now recommend eudoramail.com) 

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