E-mail Anywhere ....
Sun Review May 26, 2001

My neighbour just signed up for a free 2-month trial to get connected to the Internet. With this free deal comes another e-mail address. Having experienced busy signals, hang-ups and generally poor Internet connectivity, he's wondering whether it was a wise idea to provide his friends with this e-mail address. The odds are that after the trial expires, so will his e-mail address.

What can you do to prevent this from happening to you? One excellent solution is to sign up for a free web-based e-mail account. Web-based e-mail comes in many flavours, and requires only the use of a computer equipped with a browser (Internet Explorer, Netscape Navigator) connected to the Internet. Your web-based e-mail address will not change when you switch ISP's (Internet Service Providers). It does not matter who your ISP is, all you need to do is visit a website to retrieve and send your e-mail messages. This is also an ideal solution for those of you travelling this summer.

So where do you sign up? Check out old favourites such as Hotmail (www.hotmail.com), which is part of the Microsoft Network and also offers cool add-ons such as MSN Messenger, the instant messaging program that will have you connecting to your friends throughout the world. Yahoo (www.yahoo.com) offers some special features such as junk mail filtering: spam is transferred straight to a junk mail folder on your account. Just make sure you check this folder every so often to make sure it didn't filter out something important. Excite Canada (www.excite.ca) lets you personalize your start page, get an address @excite.ca, manage your stock portfolio and more.

If you're the patriotic type, you might prefer a slightly more Canadian address. Visit Canada.com, Southam's gigantic newspaper portal to sign up for an @canada.com account. Show them that you are Canadian and advertising for Molson at www.Iam.ca, or get your Beer mail at www.beer.com.

Remember that if you're forced to provide an e-mail address while visiting a website but don't want to provide your real e-mail address, you can always provide a fudged address such as someone@example.com. That should reduce the amount of junk mail you receive, and also allows you to stay anonymous. Your personal information remains secret while allowing you to enjoy the solicitor site's service without fear or guilt.

Questions or comments? E-mail inge@ingenius.bc.ca or visit www.ingenius.bc.ca/webwoman.