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I've had loads of different free addresses but now I have settled on paying Apple for their 'mobileme' service which is also excellent if you have an iphone or Mac. Worth a try for free for 60 days before paying the £50 or so to see if you like it.
Hi Chris, Google Mail (gmail) works very well and is free. More importantly, it is spam friendly so your emails are less likely to get trapped by the spam filters. (Hotmail, MSN has a big problem with spam filters).
The £50 for Apple/ Mobileme is very good value, and also provides an idisk which is worth the cost alone.
Gmail gets my vote - been using it since I left full time work 5 years ago with no problems -I use Outlook to download it at home and have had no problems accessing it across the world and in many unusual destinations. The Spam filters seem to work very well with just the occasional genuine message getting trapped by them, but then it's easy to view them once a day to check.
gmail is brilliant, as are the calendar which you can share, the free web page maker and web pages, blogger, Picasa for your photographs etc etc. Spam protection is good too.
I also use Thunderbird as a free alternative to Outlook to handle the mail.
Open Ofiice is a brilliant free alternative to MS Office
When I retired I made sure that all my software was legal and using all the above free meansI have never had to pay a thing.
Good point and yes, I do that occasionally - that's when I find gmails screens a bit confusing :? however, when I'm away from home I usually use my smartphone which is virtually as good as my home computer and I get all my e-mails on that as well.
i use hotmail, i have been on it for years no probs at all, and its compatable with all the others too.the best spyware i have found is Spybot, once you install it and run it, it stops every thing and does not interfere with browsing. i run it once a month and it gets rid of it all, if i pick up trojans or malware it blocks them automatically and then clears them when i run it. it's a free download and a small package too, it does not need a lot of memory to run it. i have used it for 10 years,it updates automatically so new bugs are added to the list and it blocks them too, it has saved me loads of times, it even has a teatimer on it so i can reset to original settings just in case.
it will reset your computer to the original settings from new, not the programs they stay the same, so it cleans it up to start with. other packages only clean from the install date so be careful what you get.
I use Gmail and have done sucessfully for years, but "wrapped" around it I use "Incredimail" that gives you a lot more facilities & options.
Basic Incredimail is free but I made a one/off payment for the "Premium" version which gives you extra useful facilities.
I therefore always click on the "Incredimail" icon on my desktop which then links with Gmail and can access meesages on the Web directly without even downloading them - and if you wish you can delete unwanted emails directly without them ever reaching your PC. Why not log onto Incredimails Website and take a look for youeself.
i use hotmail, i have been on it for years no probs at all, and its compatable with all the others too.the best spyware i have found is Spybot, once you install it and run it, it stops every thing and does not interfere with browsing. i run it once a month and it gets rid of it all, if i pick up trojans or malware it blocks them automatically and then clears them when i run it. it's a free download and a small package too, it does not need a lot of memory to run it. i have used it for 10 years, it updates automatically so new bugs are added to the list and it blocks them too, it has saved me loads of times, it even has a teatimer on it so i can reset to original settings just in case. it will reset your computer to the original settings from new, not the programs they stay the same, so it cleans it up to start with. other packages only clean from the install date so be careful what you get. this was my hobby until i had the stag.
Spybot is great and it and malwarebytes should be used as a backup to Anti-Virus. There is not a single antivirus that is any good at all at blocking non viral spyware. AVG is very good but is set by default to run the hard drive scan at midday
every single day and it *will* slow your computer down if you are running it at that time. If your PC is hardly ever on at midday then its never scanned which is not good.
But some of this post is just plain wrong as spybot either doesn't do whats being claimed, or only does it if you set it up a certain way. Firstly spybot cannot reset the pc to original factory settings, if it did any software installed since new by you would either break or cause something else to break. Secondly spybot only protects you from bad downloads etc if you manually do the "immunisation phase" yourself or change the default settings to do it automatically after each update. Warning here many browser and especially IE8 can object strongly to the very large list of restricted sites that spybot then creates in the security tab of internet options, rendering it virtually unuseable (not always oddly but when it does its a PITA to remove the list again). Thirdly spybot does not auto update unless you create a schedule for it to do so. Fourthly unless you are very computer literate the teatimer function will just ask you hundreds of annoying questions you will not know the answer too and is you answer a question wrongly things *will* break, switch it off when asked during install.
What we professionally recommend to our customers is that you use either AVG or AVAST as they are better than anything that you pay for, we tend to edge towards avast because its possible to set up the hard drive scan in the screen saver which means the scan is *much* more likely to run and not be cancelled by the user because its slowing the PC down just when you want to use it. Then we recomend that you scan with malwarebytes (quick scan) weekly and spybot monthly or if you think you have a malware problem). Then we recommend that if you have teenagers you install the paid for malwarebytes and set it up to quick scan weekly, flash scan after each update and update once an hour. (similarly if you or anyone in your family is an avid social networking site user this product is a really good investment!) Its about £23 but you do not have to renew it every year.
Other than as above the advice on here has been pretty good and I agree that gmail is probably the best free email service.
Oh BTW one half of our business is fixing pc's and removing viruses for residential users and the other half is looking after small and medium sized businesses so we do know our stuff on this.
Sounds like good advice there, I've printed it out so I can make some changes. I renewed my macafee about three months ago, and it now takes about 6 hours to do a scan:shock:
I think i will get rid of that, and follow your advice above.
I am probably not supposed to say this so I'll caveat it with "In my professional opinion" macafee and norton are rubbish, kaspersky is good but is now so bloated that it slows all but the most top end machines down substantially, in the office Bullguard is know as Bullsh*t cos it keeps breaking peoples email or internet access.
Personal software firewalls are a waste for 50% of the population as they again ask questions 50% won't know the answer to, leading to broken things if you block something you shouldn't. Just use the windows firewall if you don't have a router and both or just turn off the windows one if you do.
Also don't buy anything labelled internet security its all bloatware and will slow all machines down, anything less than a new £700 machine will be slowed considerably.
Finally if you bank with natwest and use internet banking do *not* install rapport when they ask you to, in 50 to 75% of cases it slows the computer so its almost unuseable and it won't protect you anyway cos it uses the same hooks to protect you that a virus can use to steal your data, making it easy for the virus writers to simply duck under or sidestep.
Right, thats enough of free advice, its made me feel quite faint ;-) See what the stag does to us! :-)
I am probably not supposed to say this so I'll caveat it with "In my professional opinion" macafee and norton are rubbish
As an ex I.T. Manager people on our complex always come to me when they are having PC problems, and I try to help them as much as possible but it was back in 1994 when I took early retirement and have not kept up to date with all that's going on in the I.T. world except to change my Laptop every few years and upgrade the Operating system.
Back to the point of this reply - the first thing I ask anyone having PC problems is do you have "Norton" or "Macafee" running, and if they have tell them to uninstall it and put AVG, Avast, or Avira on in its place. You would be surprised how many times this usually solves their problems.
Currently I have Avira on my Notebook, and my wife has AVG on hers - we don't like to put all are eggs in one basket so run 2 different anti-virus packages and note the effects they have on running speed etc.
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