e-mail recommendations
 

My teenage son is travelling in Italy and Greece this June, and we want him to keep in touch via e-mail. He doesn't have an account yet. Any recommendations?

I use all of these, and each one has some advantages and disadvantages. <BR> <BR>www.usa.net <BR>www.hotmail.com <BR>www.yahoo.com <BR>www.visto.com <BR>www.runbox.com <BR> <BR>You can see which I use as my primary. and I offload into Netscape Messenger, as well as archive in Visto and Runbox. <BR> <BR>Best wishes, <BR> <BR>Rex <BR>

Standard service used by travellers is hotmail.com, mostly because of its extensive address book. <BR>Downside is its microsoft & all the cool addresses have gone (I have them all)also storage is limited to 2 meg. <BR> <BR>With Yahoo you can also format a page to download things specific to you (horoscope, sports, etc) as well as email - saves surfing time which costs money in cybercafes.(my yahoo) <BR>There is a list of cafes on the net , he should take the URL so he knows where the next one is. <BR>Occasionally hotmail (& other services) goes down for a day.Either accept this or get 2 addresses. <BR> <BR>x-drive.com also provides lots of storage space, you can scan in your passport etc & leave it there in case its stolen.(or store it as an email attachment in hotmail etc as long as its not too big)This is worth doing for peace of mind.Lost passports are much less of a prob if you have a copy.Most travellers carry a photocopy, but this can be lost too.

I agree with Frank's assessment that Hotmail and Yahoo are the two main contenders. I have both in addition to my professional email account. I too prefer to avoid "microsloth", but the address book feature is a nice one:) Keep in mind that Yahoo gives you 6 megs -- which if you are sending yourself pictures downloaded from your digital camera, could be a plus. I also like the my.yahoo front page that you can personalize. I always have the weather for Paris on mine! As well as Skopje, Chicago and wherever I might be going next :)

Ooooooo... You are GOOD Frank! I missed your comment about how to have your passport first page available in cyberspace. That's NEAT! Howver you certainly want it someplace that it isn't easy to find -- and remember folks... a color copy of a US passport is illegal.

I don't knw, Sally - - you can easily write "COPY - - DO NOT DUPLICATE" somewhere right on it. Under what law would a person be prosecuted for having a color copy - - the wrong size - - of their own passport? <BR> <BR>I make them for every kid I travel with - - one for them, one for their parents, one for me. <BR> <BR>I would be a little leery about a copy of it floating through cyberspace. <BR>

My "source" is the legal citation from the US statute code posted on the color copiers at my local Kinko's. The reason behind that law is, I imagine, that, for any document that has value when it appears genuine, a color copy has the potential to be mistaken for it. [It is also illegal to make color copies of US paper money, for example.]

You can also access aol.mail from any browser. I've done it in Hungary, Chech Rep, France and Spain. I also access it through my IE at work at times (like now). <BR>

I prefer Yahoo as I like their home pages and I just like Yahoo as a company and dislike Microsoft. I block Hotmail addresses from my email delivery as there is too much spam from it, that might be a consideration. I don't know what the adress list thing is about; I just developed a bias against Hotmail in its early years due to spam and it seemed very young (but since your son is a teen, he'd fit in). I might add that someone made a remark in another post which called Yahoo, Hotmail etc email accounts "fake" (someone named Rex did this, I believe). They are not "fake" accounts at all, completely real. Above is my "fake" account which means it is not a currently working address. I have a personal AOL email account, also, but frankly, I am beginning to prefer my Yahoo account over AOL (and I do use both, my AOL one more for professional and family stuff) because my AOL account is crammed full of spam every day and my Yahoo one is not. As many money as AOL spends on nonsense like censoring their boards, you'd think they could filter out more of the junk email, especially when it's full of vulgar words right in the subject line. Geez, any idiot can figure out what it is from the subject (except the idiots at AOL). You can access your AOL mail from regular internet now, so if he has no internet account, you usually can sign up for a free trial AOL account if you get one of their diskettes at a movie theater or something (30 days, I think). But if he has internet access now just a personal email account somewhere, Yahoo will do the trick.

I use iwon.com as my alternate email address (and for posting in forums, etc.) I can forward my other email to that address temporarily while I'm on vacation. Worked for my daughter when she was in Costa Rica for three months, so I expect it will do me fine over 3 weeks in Italy. (However I may not even access while we're gone!)

Hi there...I've used both Yahoo and Hotmail and I MUCH prefer Yahoo for mail and everything else. With Hotmail I always get a lot of spam, often pornographic, and I NEVER get that through my Yahoo account. Good luck!

Christina, <BR> <BR>when I said a "fake" e-mail account on hotmail or Yahoo - - what I meant was that if you want to communicate with someone and you want NOT to use your "real" e-mail account (which might also be a hotmail or yahoo or other web-based account) - - then you can set up a "temporary" (maybe a better word than "fake") pseudonym or anonymous account, without disclosing your "true" e-mail address. This would have VERY limited use, except for requesting information behind a "masked" identity. <BR>

Although the address I give here is a Hotmail account, I also use Yahoo and I concur with the others who prefer it. I do get a lot of porn spam on the hotmail account but I can't really compare that with Yahoo, because I don't post that address on the net. But Yahoo does give you three times as much space, is easy to manipulate, is better designed, usually loads faster, and I've never had technical problems with them, unlike with Hotmail. It annoys me that new messages to Hotmail go at the bottom of your list of messages in your inbox--what a pain to scroll down or click to another page to see what junk mail has come in. They go to the top at Yahoo. The address book feature on Yahoo works pretty well in my experience.

Folks. You can eliminate much of that spam on hotmail by setting your filters in options. Now it's only the occasional viagra/cheap mortagage/nubile teens post that gets through :)

I get much more spam on my hotmail accounts than on Yahoo - could be because I use them more but I think spammers are using email ID guessing programs based on hotmail - its so big you can do this.Don't like adresses like 8d6k3xk8. <BR> I find I can't trust the hotmail "bulk mail folder" to work on its own - its has already sucked in some quite important business letters. <BR> I think I'll give in & take out a bank loan to pay for all the viagra I'll need when the hot teens see my new dental work & my list of fake doctorates. <BR> Or I could put these keywords in my filters.