If you lost your email messages few times this years due to virus or hard disk crash, having a web based free email account might solve your problem the next time it happens. The good news it that the major portals still compete for new clients by offering free email accounts.

Sometimes we find ourselves in a vacuum after frustration with our previous Internet Service Provider, switching to a new one is not easy, especially when it requires changing an email address. Having a third party free email account might be a solution.

For some of us having our own domain name becomes critical, so I'll give and example of how to create a free email account and forward it to a $10 a year personal or business domain name.

Which free email account to choose?

1. Yahoo.com free email:

I like Yahoo.com free mail because it gives me 100MB of storage, with spam and antivirus protection. I can also share my calendar with everybody on the Internet or synchronize my calendar and address book with Outlook, Palm OS, Pocket PC or Lotus Organizer. Ads will appear when you open your email box. Yahoo  allows to send and receive messages up to 10MB. It is a good deal, considering worry free and high availability of Yahoo.com services. Click the following link to open your free email account: http://mail.yahoo.com/

If you need your own domain name and just a starting page would do for now (don't need hosting yet) then for $10 per year you can purchase your own domain name at Yahoo and forward the domain name to your free Yahoo email account. This service comes with a free starting page, here is an example: http://p.hostingprod.com/@yd1.info/. Why would you need this? Only if you need, for now, to print your own domain name on your business card and have an anchor page on the web, or until the time you make a decision about which hosting service is good for you. Besides, and this might be even more important, keeping your domain name management separate from your hosting company services may give you more flexibility in choosing or changing (in the future) your web hosting company.

So, for $10 a year we can have our own domain name pointed to free email account at yahoo.com with 100MB storage, and a landing page.

Yahoo removed POP3 service (access to Yahoo email through local email client) two years ago, but here is a solution to this problem Fetch Yahoo 

2. Hotmail.com free email:

Hotmail's 2MB of free disk space makes this service difficult to use.

3. Gmail free email by google.com

Google.com is testing its own free email service. It will offer 1GB storage (10 times more than Yahoo) and what may be more important POP3 access. POP3 stands for Post Office Protocol version 3 and allows downloading email messages from email server (google.com in this case) to an email client (like Outlook or Eudora) residing in your computer. So we could use google.com Gmail as both web based email client or as an email server for our Outlook program. Why would we like to do the latter? We could do this for backup purposes. Keep a copy of all of our emails at Gmail and another copy on our desktop computer (Yahoo doesn't support this service). Gmail is not an active service yet. Please click here to check the status.

If you have questions or would like to contribute to this article please send email to support@applix.net

November, 2004
applix.net support

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