WebMail Assistant .

This program is designed to extend the capabilities of Hotmail and Yahoo Mail, and to make them faster and easier to use.

More importantly it lets you save messages and address book information on your own hard drive.

Tracks Eraser

Recover Lost Files

Personal Email - Addresses, Accounts and Solutions

Email is the main application used on the Internet and is not only indispensible for businesses of any size but for personal use as well.

Online merchants expect you to have an email address, and It isn't possible to place an order on the Internet without a valid email address.

Most people use a free email address provided by either their ISP (Internet Services provider) or an email address from one of the big three -Yahoo, Hotmail or Google Gmail.

ISP Email Accounts and Addresses

Almost all ISPs (Internet Services providers) provide email services as part of the Internet connection package. In the early days of the Internet most people used the email facilities provided by the ISP (e.g. AOL-America online).

The main problem with ISP email is what happens if you decide to change ISPs?

Yahoo, Hotmail or Gmail

Although free has its obvious attractions you should note that it isn't really free. All of the big three have ad supported email which may annoy you but that is the price of free email.

But that really isn't the only problem. Several years ago both Microsoft (hotmail) and Yahoo changed their policies on free email so that instead of being accessible via web based clients i.e. a browser and a desktop client like Outlook Express they could only be accessed by Web mail.

This effectively forced the email user to view the ads.

This may not appear too bad as most people seem to prefer the web browser based access anyway but what about the next policy change?

For me the future of free email is too uncertain and I only recommend it for temporary email addresses i.e. email addresses that if you loose you don't really care.

If you are going to use a free email account then presently I consider Google Gmail to be the best as it is more flexible and the ads less intrusive.

Paid Email Accounts

Paying for email isn't expensive and you can get email for around $20 per year. Just as with small business email you have two options.

Web hosting + email hosting
Email Hosting only

It all starts with a domain name which costs around $8-$16. The domain name provides you with email addresses and a web address that you can use for your website if required.

However a domain name alone does not provide you with email storage. For that you will need email hosting which you can get either as part of a web hosting package or as separate email hosting.

Understanding Email hosting and Web Hosting

Because the primary means of contact for website owners is email then all web hosting providers provide email addresses and email hosting (mailboxes) as part of the web hosting package.

Here is a screenshot of 1and1 uk web hosting and email package showing the email part.

The three columns are for different packages, but even the most basic package has 20 email accounts which is enough for most small businesses.

You will find other web hosting accounts offer similar email facilities.

You can see that even the basic package has 20 email addresses (each with 2GByte storage) which is more than enough for personal use.

However what if you don't want a website but only email accounts. In this case you have two alternatives:

Purchase the web hosting package and just use the email accounts
Purchase an email only hosting.

Email Only Hosting

Generally this is cheaper than website hosting and if you purchase the email hosting from a provider that provides both email and web hosting then the features and management interface is the same.

In addition if you decide to get a website at a later date you just add it on and you manage it all from the same control panel.

If you are USA based you may want to take a look at

1and1.com

and If you are UK based then

1and1.co.uk

Once you have signed up for the domain name and hosting account you will then need to setup the email addresses and then configure the email client to access the email.

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