www.drinky.org.uk - How to Choose an Email Address

The Beginners Guide to How to Choose an Email Address

Choosing an Email address is simple, but if you want to use it for a while you may as well get a good one.

Ok, you're on the 'net, now you want Email, but where to start? Well it's simple enough to get an Email account free of charge, there are billions of free accounts to be had but if you want to use it as your main Email address there are a few things to consider.

Do you want webmail or popmail? Did I just hear you say, "Eh?" Well webmail is an Email account that exists with an Internet website based company, such as Yahoo, MSN, or Hotmail. You access your mail through their site. Popmail is the kind of account given to you by the company you have your Internet connection with. You have to use an Email program such as Outlook Express to collect it.

My suggestion would be to go with webmail for many reasons. Firstly security. Email programs download all of your mail onto your computer and open them when you click to look at them. You've heard of attachments right? These are files included in an Email which the sender wishes you to look at or read. All very innocent, like people from work sending you copies of figures, or your friends sending you a funny picture. Ahhh well, it's not all that innocent. Most viruses nowadays are passed by Email and often pretend to be people you know, so downloading them automatically and opening everything that's in them is generally a bad idea. The viruses assume a certain level of inexperience to be able to pass themselves around, they are very clever programs.

To use an Email account such as this through Outlook Express or whatever, I certainly recommend the use of Anti-Virus software. If you want to know more about this area, read the Beginners Guide to How to Avoid Computer Viruses. Most webmail providers use a virus scanner to scan all of your mail, or offer the option to scan attachments before you download them, make sure you take advantage of this! There are advantages of using popmail accounts though and I will discuss these at the end.

Another main reason to use webmail is continuity. People change their ISP (Internet Service Provider - that's the people you have your Internet connection with), if you change you will lose the account that came with it. If you use webmail, it doesn't matter who your ISP is, as long as you can connect to the Internet, your account is always there.

Another element to continuity is that most webmail providers offer almost the same features available as dedicated software nowadays. That's calendars, contact address books, notepads, mail filtering (so you can specify what mail goes into which folders when it reaches you, kinda like clever sorting) and so on. If your computer breaks down or you get a virus or anything goes wrong, all of your contact details are still there. These people spend massive amounts of money ensuring that all of their stuff stays working, doesn't break, doesn't shutdown. It's always there and that is a big job when you think they are dealing with millions of people. How much effort do you put in to make sure your computer is disaster proof? If you say your PC is disaster proof, then you probably don't understand the term. We're talking, earthquake, volcano, flood and power failure proof.

There's one big advantage to using a popmail account and that's storage space, the amount of Email you can hold in your account before it's full. Really it's not a big deal unless you get LOADS of Email or you get files sent to you that are huge. But most webmail providers are dealing with literally millions of people and storage space for that many people costs biiiiiiiiig money. They normally limit you to between 2 and 6 MB (that's MegaBytes). What if someone needs to send you an 8MB file? You're screwed? No. Always have a popmail account as backup. ISPs generally deal with far fewer people than webmail providers but will probably have similar resources. They don't care how big your files are as they will only be on their systems until you come and collect your mail, whereas webmail is permanently on their systems until you delete it. So, don't disregard the Email account your ISP gave you, just keep it as a spare and use a webmail account as your main one.

Of the webmail providers. One in particular stands out and they really do shine above the rest. There are thousands of them but Yahoo is unquestionably the best. They are probably the third biggest after Hotmail and MSN, but they beat them both hands down for features. With Yahoo you get 4MB of space changing to 6 after a certain period, calendar, address book, notepad, mail filters, virus scanning of attachments (you have to click the button!) and a million other things. You don't get this much space, the calendar or notepad with the other two. With Hotmail and MSN you get only 2 or 3MB.

Another major advantage of Yahoo over the others is that Yahoo has a far better spam blocking policy than MSN or Hotmail. I have a Hotmail account and it receives that much junk mail it is barely usable, I now use it as a dustbin. You know when you have to fill in online forms and you know these guys are going to send you crap for the rest of your days? I give them my Hotmail address because I can't use the account for anything else.

As part of the deal when using Yahoo, MSN or Hotmail you get the advantages of their services. That's chat rooms, search engines, news, free webpages and instant messaging programs etc. They are all massive 'content providers' and there is little to choose between them on this front. MSN and Hotmail are both run by Microsoft and there is some benefit to be had by using Microsoft services if you run Windows, however I dislike the way Windows Messenger starts up automatically and cannot be closed when I visit Hotmail or open Outlook Express. As for search engines, they are both very good, but if you want to use the best search engine of them all then use Google, which is entirely separate.

So to summarise, get a Yahoo email account ;) Keep your ISP provided popmail account for when people need to send you big stuff and maybe use a Hotmail, MSN or some other account to use as a dustbin for any mail you know will keep coming that you don't want. To look for free webmail accounts, search, Yahoo, MSN or Google.

Just a few final points. These days everyone and their dog have an Email account. There are only so many account names to go around and so, most of the large providers will already have an account called pretty much everything you can think of. Try what you want, but most likely it will already be taken and you will be offered some variations or the opportunity to have another go. If you don't like any of the suggestions, try some variation on your desired name, like adding meaningful numbers, such as your date of birth to the end, like johnsmith85, or johnsmith1985. However, if your name is John Smith, the chances are that every variation has gone years ago, given the amount of John Smiths in the world! You may also use underscores, that's the _ symbol to break up words. Just play with the possibilities, the site you are using will offer guidelines on what you can and can't use. If you really are insistent on the name of your email address then you will probably have to trawl the smaller providers who will have more names available. Whatever you do, just don't use capital letters! This will confuse some computers for reasons I won't waste time discussing, just don't do it.

Also, make sure you choose a password you can remember. If you forget it, you won't be able to log in and they will close your account. Write down your email address, your username and password and the web address of the account provider (for Yahoo, that would be mail.yahoo.com), add it to your Favourites or Bookmarks in your Web Browser or even set it as your Home Page. Keep these details safe and well hidden until you can remember them all the time. Then throw them away. The last thing you need is your nosey brother / sister / mother / father / boyfriend / girlfriend / husband / wife finding it and reading your Email. So be careful with your password at all times.

Just remember however, it doesn't matter what type of account you have or who it's with. They all require you to login at least every 30 days approximately or they will close your account. For more information on spam and computer viruses, read the Beginners Guide to How to Avoid Computer Viruses.

By the way, this is not an advert for Yahoo ;) They really are that much better than everyone else.

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