mail account – Choosing the Green Ring

The other day I tried to email a friend of mine. It was just one of those questionaires that people forward to their friends, so it wasn’t very important, fortunately. Just as well, because my email bounced back. My guess is that my friend hadn’t logged on for a while and his account had been deleted. That sort of thing is really annoying, so I thought I’d suggest a couple of alternatives. Not to my friend. He wouldn’t listen, but I’m going to post them here instead.

If you want a web based email account, Icerocket is a nice choice. You get 100 mb of storage and on the Icerocket site, there’s a blog search engine. I like Icerocket, and I can really recommend it.

Fastmail.fm is another great email provider. You can use it as a web based email account, but if you like, you can also use the imap function. That means you can check your email in your mail program (Eudora, Mail etc). The downside is that you don’t get smtp, so you’ll need to go to the website to send emails. There’s also relatively little storage included (10 mb). However, there are several other levels to choose between, if you want to pay. One level (member) means a one time payment only, and there won’t be any ads/taglines at the bottom of the email. You also get smtp, and a bit more storage (16 mb).

The higher levels involve paying a certain sum of money every year. With those you get more storage and pop access.

There’s a bit of difference between pop and imap and if you want to set up your email program to receive your emails you’ll need to specify imap, not pop.

Imap means that you get the emails in your mail program, but they also remain on the server, which means you will have to go to website to delete emails, and it can eat up your storage quickly.

Here is lesson nr two in my little mini computer school.

‘Can I have your Hotmail address?’ Recognize the question? I’m sure you do. It doesn’t mean, as you might think, a wish to have that person’s Hotmail address. No, it simply means any email address at all, except for their work email or (if they’re students) the university email address.

Actually, believe it or not, there are plenty of other email providers. Web based and those that can be set up to send your email straight to your own mail program.

That’s the next word that might need explaining. You can get your email sent straight ‘home’ to your computer. The web based accounts can be accessed in a web browser (see the last lesson). If you want, you can also get a email address with what is called Pop Access. It means that if you can overcome the difficulties in setting up your mail program, your email will come straight to your mail box (on your computer).

Here’s a little personal opinion: you might need more than one email address. What will you do if your email account isn’t working anymore? If you can’t send or receive emails? Or – in some cases – you can’t even access your old emails?

Besides, you might want to keep some friends and acquaintances separate. Or you might want to sign up for some newsletters (of course they’re usually more or less all commercial and who would expose themselves to that voluntarily?)

So you get yourself a few mail accounts – maybe two or three. That’s usually enough for most people.

Though if you’re the kind of person who takes pride in only checking your email once every three months, just forget about having an email address. You won’t be accessible so you should stop claiming to be. Your friend might actually think that means they might be able to reach you at your email address.

Tag: mail account

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