| Get Your 'Free Lunch' Here |
If you're too cheap to buy an account
from a local
Internet Service Provider, or if you're
tired of sharing
your account with other people, or if
you want a
lifetime account whose address you'll
never have to
change, there's a free e-mail box just
waiting for you
on the World Wide Web.
In fact, there could be a dozen of them.
Companies
like Hotmail, Netaddress, Rocketmail,
Geocities
and many others are revolutionizing
the economics
of e-mail. Most do not collect any fees
because
they make their money from advertising,
often
personalised advertising which they
tailor according
to the information you must provide
in a
questionnaire.
Apart from answering these questions,
all you need
do to claim your free e-mail is get
access to the
web and a browser, which are becoming
increasingly available at public facilities
such as
libraries and cybercafes. You also need
to follow
certain rules, of course: transgressions
such as
sending out mass junk mail, using vulgar
language,
slandering others, or trading in kiddie
porn could
result in the termination of your account,
if not
some time in prison.
Users should also be warned that not
all e-mail
services are created equal. Some provide
special
features such as spellcheckers, classifieds
pages,
file attachments, and multimedia news
and
entertainment. For instance, Hotmail
at
http://www.hotmail.com/ provides you
with a daily
horoscope. You can also customise the
look of
your page, spellcheck your messages,
and hunt for
a job in the classifieds.
But Hotmail can't match the downloading
speed of
Rocketmail, at http://www.rocketmail.com/.
This
service seems to be one of the fastest
and most
frequented in cyberspace. It has some
features
similar to Hotmail, and some additional
ones, as
well, such as fax and voice mail.
Try out Netaddress at http://www.netaddress.com/
for its powerful forwarding service,
which lets you
rout incoming messages automatically
to as many
as five different destinations. In other
words, it gives
you a central, permanent account which
you can
use to transfer messages to and from
work, home
or play. It can also send out automatic
replies, and
even beep your pager when you have a
message.
Geocities, at http://geocities.datacellar.net/
goes one
better by offering not only free e-mail
accounts, but
also free server space so you can set
up your own
homepage.
There are plenty of other e-mail services
that each
offer their own unique attractions (some
charge a
small registration fee). Starmail at
http://www.starmail.com/ gives away
vanity e-mail
boxes with customized addresses. For
instance,
fans of The Simpsons can set their address
to
D'oh@homer.com.
Netforward at http://www.netforward.com/
has a
forwarding service with over 20 domain
names to
choose from such as cyberjunkie.com,
or
18thhole.com for all you golfing fools
out there.
Graybook Services at http://www.graybook.com/
is
a free change-of-address service for
e-mail and URL
addresses. If you move or change your
Internet
provider, it's often easy to get disconnected
from
others who have only your old addresses,
but
Graybook lets you post a new address
so that
others can check for your latest whereabouts.
There may yet be a price to pay for these
services:
a loss of reliability. Sometimes messages
sent from
these sites seem to arrive a day or
two late, or
worse, never arrive at all. These glitches
should
eventually be ironed out, but in the
meantime do be
careful and double check if you're sending
something that's really vital.
In the end, though, the rapidly increasing
number of
these free e-mail services is a testament
to just
how useful they are. Compared to the
brute
functionality of text-based messaging
systems like
Pine, they even seem rather elegant.
And there's no
doubt they're helping to make e-mail
the fastest
growing and least expensive form of
communication
around today.
After all, talk is cheap, they say, but
e-mail is free.