I’m cutting the umbilical, and cancelling AOL in the next week or two, after almost 10 years. <sob> Be gentle. I am already an MSN “member”- that is to say, I have my Passport ID and evvaythang.
I went to sign up for HotMail, only to find out that it’s no longer free e-mail. HUH??? Since when? And, does anyone know of a free e-mail service still out there?? Cutting costs is the key. Yes, HotMail is fairly cheap per year and I may have to go with it.
Still, I remember the days when you could get on the Web and get free HotMail. Thoughts?
Hotmail is still free, it is only the extra storage that costs extra. I would personally go get a yahoo account as that offers more storage than hotmail.
I know what you’re talking about, I helped a friend set up an account a week ago.
If you follow what looks like the obvious sign-up pages, you are suddenly faced with a page asking for your credit card info, and telling you what it will cost.
You have to go back a page or two and look carefully for the link for the free signup. It is not obvious, but it is there.
I use Yahoo as my spam-risk account (anytime I must fill in an on-line form where I think there is the potential to get spammed as a result) and I use Lycos for everything else.
HotMail is still free, but I’ve been finding it increasingly sucky and problematic. I’d been with HotMail from way back before Microsoft bought them out, and until recently my HotMail account was spam-free (honestly!). But lately the service has it’s been so rotten overall, that I abandoned it for one of the many free alternatives that offer better service with more storage space.
yojimboguy, you are correctamundo. MAN, that’s sneaky. I did find where I could just go for the 2 megs of storage and have it for free. Sheeesh.
Charmain, please articulate upon the “suckiness” of HotMail? Since I just established an account, and was about to shift my e-mail link for SDMB to that name, enlighten me and save me some heartache? Should I go with Yahoo or Lycos instead?
Make your Hotmail account exclusive, meaning only people YOU add can mail you. I did this about 6 months ago, then threatened everyone on my list with death if they sent me SPAM, junk, or postcards. I kid you not, not ONE piece of SPAM has made it’s way through. Not 1.
Do a Google search for free email. For various purposes I have email accounts with Budweiser, Dewalt, Dupont racing, Lovemail, Homestead, and a few others. You can have up to 6 email accounts with MSN too but you will be bombarded with spam on all of them.
I feel qualified since I’ve had a hotmail account since '97. Before they were bought out, anyway.
First thing is that the spam protection sucks. Bigtime. My account gets aroun 200 new spams a day – I gave up using it as anything but a curiosity a year ago. With all spam filters on the amount of spam isn’t cut down at all.
A new account set up garnered spam without having it used for anything at all.
Only 2 megs of storage. Nuff said here. Plus with all the spam my account is always full – if someone was actually trying to send a message to that account it would be deleted pretty quickly as I’m alway over my limit.
I found Yahoo much better – I never got any spam in my inbox. Ever. Anything sent was succesfully filtered into the Junkmail box and ignored, this is something they do automatically and I never had to set anything up.
Plus you get 5 megs of space for the same price as hotmails.
The interface is also a lot less graphically intensive, I found it a lot faster.
I feel qualified since I’ve had a hotmail account since '97. Before they were bought out, anyway.
First thing is that the spam protection sucks. Bigtime. My account gets aroun 200 new spams a day – I gave up using it as anything but a curiosity a year ago. With all spam filters on the amount of spam isn’t cut down at all.
A new account set up garnered spam without having it used for anything at all.
Only 2 megs of storage. Nuff said here. Plus with all the spam my account is always full – if someone was actually trying to send a message to that account it would be deleted pretty quickly as I’m alway over my limit.
I found Yahoo much better – I never got any spam in my inbox. Ever. Anything sent was succesfully filtered into the Junkmail box and ignored, this is something they do automatically and I never had to set anything up.
Plus you get 5 megs of space for the same price as hotmails.
The interface is also a lot less graphically intensive, I found it a lot faster.
Chalk up another vote for Yahoo! over Hotmail. It just works better IMHO.
[unrelated rant] And Microsoft is evil. Okay, maybe Yahoo! is evil too, but they have yet to piss me off personally. Whereas like most Mac users, I will never ever forgive Microsoft for stealing Mac OS and calling it Windows. [/unrelated rant]
That said, it’s still not a bad idea to create TWO Yahoo! accounts with slightly different names, such as Bobsmith100@yahoo.com and Bobsmith200@yahoo.com. Use the second one for high-risk use such as newsletters sign-ups, and the first for trusted friends.
Also, keep in mind that high risk can include certain friends who like to pass humor spams. One of the ways that your email ends up on spam lists is because it gets onto one of those “10 Reasons Why Blah Blah” lists that snowballs until one unscupulous fellow realized that the 300 names in the “cc” field are worth something, and sells them to a friend who spams for a living, who pastes it onto his list of 10,000 people who he’s collected the same way. A lot of people don’t realize that this is how they get screwed. Worst of all, you don’t know who to blame.
[1] Both Hotmail and Yahoo! are moving towards paid-only services. Both are increasingly pushing premium accounts, and I imagine both are waiting to see what happens to another.com since they went to paid accounts.
[2] Smaller providers may be more feature-rich but are also less reliable. I’ve had two medium-sized mail providers go belly-up on me. Pick a small company at your peril.
The service I always recommend (and use) is MyRealBox. It has free POP3 access, the spam filtering is excellent and downtime minimal. It’s head and shoulders above Yahoo and Hotmail who are, indeed, slowly and surely moving toward pay only services.
