Hello, I'm Neil Jones, a UK Citizen. My nickname is derived from the name for my site. :-)
I like...
Hello, I'm Neil Jones, a UK Citizen. My nickname is derived from the name for my site. :-)
I like the internet, the internet and the internet. I have loads of (online) friends and I am part of quite a few Internet Communities in some way. I also get...
Member since:01.03.2001
Reviews:31
Members who trust:1
Yahoo is a brand that seems to be taking over the internet. Most people just used to see them as a search engine. Now you can find them running Clubs, mailing lists, a web hosting service and email services.
Fortunately the Yahoo! Mail is really good. You get 6Mb of space which is like three Hotmail accounts in one go. Options on the web interface include choice of colours, the standard filtering options and an auto-reponse message for holidays. You also get a bulk folder for all those spam messages and you can also enable POP3 access for downloading your mail to your computer via Outlook Express.
One of the good things is that you can have a yahoo.something email address. So if you're in the UK you can have something@yahoo.co.uk for example. This isn't very clear though so if you go to yahoo.com you'll get a yahoo.com address, similiarly if you go to yahoo.hk you'll get an @yahoo.hk address. So for a UK one, go to yahoo.co.uk.
There is an upper limit of 2MB per email with attachments but this is no great loss. Downloading through POP3 at home is good but the web interface is good for access through colleges and so on.
The service is fast indeed - on testing email forms on a website, the email comes to my yahoo address immediately or shortly afterwards. This is more than can be said for Hotmail. Sending email either from the web interface or the SMTP server is good but you need to have authorised yourself to the POP server first before you can send mail through SMTP. No loss, just do a check for new email and you're through!
One other interesting thing is that Yahoo Mail is tied into the Yahoo Messenger program. If you have Yahoo Messenger running and a new email comes into your box, you get alerted by an envelope on the taskbar, a sound and an on-screen caption of the sender and subject. Really cool. Or it would be if it worked. Sometimes Messenger says you have no new mail even though OE downloads three messages through the POP server. Likewise if you have no new mail Messenger tells you that you do have new mail. Having said that it does only seem to be a temporary problem (and of course POP/SMTP servers do go down or become unavailable for any reason so that's not a problem for me).
This is a much better and faster alternative to Hotmail, though if you don't have a Yahoo ID by now you will have to have one to get an email address with Yahoo so you'll get stuck with an awkward email address as all the good names on Yahoo's ID system went ages ago :-) Plus you can use the Yahoo ID in all of Yahoo's services so it's a good free investment anyway.
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Sep 29th, 2001
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