i'm headed over to italy for six months and have promised to send e-mails periodically to friends and family. does anyone have any input on who might be the most reliable e-mail provider while in europe? thanks! <BR>-sylvie

Sylvie, just get a hotmail address at www hotmail.com It is free. And then just use some of the internet cafes etc. I do this everytime I travel and it is a great way to stay in touch. Peg.

thanks peg, i checked the hotmail website, but this scared me: "You agree that Microsoft may access your account, including its contents, as stated above or to respond to service or technical issues." do you know what's up with that? <BR>

As you can see I use Gateway normally for my email, but also keep a Hotmail address and when I go to Europe I notify everyone to email me at that address. Whenever I go to a cyber cafe or use a computer in Europe it seems they log onto AOL for me, assuming that I am an American so I must be AOL, so apparently that works in Europe also. But Hotmail has worked perfectly for me.

Sylvie, as i only use hotmail when travelling, I regard anything I put in there as a postcard, so that I don't get too bothered if i thought anyone else would read it. Also when you get home, print up all the emails you have sent of your adventures and travels and paste them in your photo album, it will bring back heaps of memories. Peg.

"what's up with that? " <BR> <BR>Sylvie: <BR> <BR>I think it's a reflection that regrettably, e-mail is a major tool for cyber-fraud and other criminal activity. Microsoft is protecting itself from lawsuits by having you agree that anything in your e-mails can be accessed for investigative (and perhaps other) reasons. <BR> <BR>Lord knows it doesn't really keep a lot of huckster from sending stuff to my account. <BR> <BR>I prefer usa.net over hotmail.com because they provide more free storage. www.visto.com provides even more, but I don't like their interface as well. One nice thing about www.usa.net is that you can "auto-forward" (a copy of)every e-mail you receive to any other e-mail address. I forward all my usa.net mail to my visto account, thus ensuring that if one service is down, I can always read the other (it's rare anymore, but it used to happen 1-2 hrs a week). <BR> <BR>If you don't want to support the Microsoft empire, there are a jillion other free, web-based e-mail resources: yahoo, excite, ad infinitum. <BR> <BR>Best wishes, <BR> <BR>Rex <BR>

I visited a few cybercafes while in Europe over the summer and found that at least a half-dozen places could accomodate all web e-mail EXCEPT hotmail accounts. I would suggest having a Yahoo account since it is also free and easy to remember when you give it out to friends.

I use YAHOO's free e-mail. If you can find an Internet cafe/portal, you can get to YAHOO. It's all done through the browser, it's free, and incredibly simple to use. You will get junk mail, but they now segregate "bulk mail" from other e-mail. I have sent and received mail via YAHOO for a few years now, and it works quite nicely.

Try Eudoramail (www.eudoramail.com).

Peg, <BR> <BR>I have both hotmail and Yahoo accounts, which I use for different purposes. But overall I prefer Yahoo, and they have a feature that lets you check other email through Yahoo. If this works with your current account, you could go to an internet cafe in Italy, send email via your Yahoo account, and also check messages on your home account. Of course, those transmissions would probably then be accessible to Yahoo too; you'd have to check their agreement. Yahoo is usually faster than hotmail in my experience, and less likely to screw up your files, though they've improved recently.

i have a question. when setting up my new account, should i indicate that i will be in italy as opposed to being located in california? <BR>-sylvie <BR>

Sylvie - since it is a "virtual" email address you can use from anywhere, you could just indicate you are from anywhere you want...like Venus or the Moon...why limit yourself to California or Italy!

We too used Yahoo last fall for our driving trip covering various countries in Eastern and Western Europe. Cyber cafes were great, we actually had an easier time in Eastern Europe. Plus with Yahoo, when we were done messaging we checked out the weather in the next country we were traveling to in order to have the right clothes handy. It really worked well!

Sylvie, <BR> <BR>I think they are only asking you where you are from for marketing purposes. <BR> <BR>If you want to be technical, the terms of service say that you will give truthful answers, so in your case California. But it wouldn't matter how you answer.

i have a friend joining me in italy who does not have access to a computer here, but was wondering if it was fairly easy to set up an e-mail account when in italy to correspond with friends and family back in the states (sorry for the run-on sentence). does anyone know? thanks! <BR>

Sylvie, <BR> <BR>why not just let her set up an account via your computer (remember, it's virtual, so it has no connection to your owbn computer). Or if she's not where you are, she could go someplace near home with public net access (like a library) and set it up. But with Yahoo, you can access the different homepages (US, Italy, Japan, whatever), from any one of the pages, so she could probably do it at a cybercafe there via the US homepage and not have to do it in Italian. But if she wants easy access to it after she's home, she'll probably want to do it on the US page, in English, regardless of where she sets it up.

Hi Sylvie, <BR>Get on line and type in http://www.startmail.com. It will take you to a window and you type in [email protected] and it ask for your password. There you go. Your mail is right there waiting for you.

All mail can be opened by the authorities, including snailmail,faxes,telegrams,parcels & letters to Santa. <BR>It has ever been so.I don't understand why people get extra paranoid about net mail...at least you can encrypt that.