Free email accounts are great! Thye can help separate work from fun email. They are good options for kids. They are good options when you have an ISP that keeps changing their name, thereby changing your email address. As promised last week, I’m outlining a few of the free email options out there:
Gmail - This is Google’s free email offering. I know some folks who love it!
Pros – you can import contacts from other email accounts; search feature is second to none; you can report spammers in an effort to filter out the bad guys.
Cons – keyword ads are placed on the mail pages; due to search features some feel Gmail is (or soon won’t be) private. Interesting – because of the extensive search feature, Gmail encourages you to “archive” messages rather than delete them.
Yahoo Mail – Yahoo mail has been around for quite a while.
Pros – it works for a lot of people; you can receive messages up to 10MG (good for photos); it integrates with Yahoo Messenger.
Cons – Yahoo has been known to change it’s privacy policy, which could mean sharing your address with third parties
FastMail – I don’t know a lot about Fastmail but in doing research it caught my eye.
Pros – you can access Fastmail from Outlook and other email clients; (In other words it supports POP and IMAP access.) you can choose from a long list of domain names to use.
Cons – does not support encrypted messaging; does not store a lot of mail.
If you are looking for other options, About.com has a nice list of their top 10 favorite free email options.
Email is still the most popular application on the Internet. Since I get questions about email I thought I’d send a few answers to the most frequently asked questions.
Email is not private. So never send your credit card number, social security number, or other information you’d rather not share via email.
Email lives longer than cockroaches. It lives on your computer and on your Internet service provider’s (ISP’s) mail server. So, it’s not a good place to keep secrets.
Work email is the property of work and people have been fired for misuse. If you need a non-work account there are free options; I’ll outline a few next week – including Gmail.
Don’t open suspicious email. Spam and viruses can look as if they come from anyone. When in doubt, don’t open strange email or attachments.
Get a virus checker (learn more in this old Byte). Ask your ISP about any industrial virus checker they might use. (I’m super happy with IP House and their virus/spam checker.)
Never reply to unwanted, unsolicited email. Once you reply, the spammers know your address is good. Even if they never use it themselves – they may sell it.
On an unrelated note, a Byte subscriber sent me a fun Minnesota podcasting site last week: The Sounds of Minnesota. It’s a short directory of MN podcasts. Some topics are not for the faint of heart – but some (others) look good.
Here are five simple suggestions to give your web site a boost with search engines and users.
- Print out the pages and read them. Is the info still true? How are your spelling and grammar? Fix any mistakes.
- Post some news or a tip or a quote on your homepage and commit to changing it on a regular basis. That will encourage search engines and visitors to come to your site more often.
- Is you homepage one big graphic or a Flash animation? Large graphics and animation are hard for search engines to catalog, hard for the visually impaired to “read”, and hard for low bandwidth folks to download it. Consider a new, more text-friendly design if your homepage is more than 30% graphics – especially if that 30% is at the top.
- Add a site map. Search engines love them and many web users are turning to site maps the way readers turn to book indexes. A site map is just a list of links to the various pages in your site.
- Do you have dated pictures on your site? Get new ones and make them color photos – unless there’s a good reason to go black and white. Certainly don’t mix and match haphazardly. (And for smarty pants friends, I know the picture on my web site is 10 years old but I haven’t changed!)
Here are five simple suggestions to give your web site a boost with search engines and users.
- Print out the pages and read them. Is the info still true? How are your spelling and grammar? Fix any mistakes.
- Post some news or a tip or a quote on your homepage and commit to changing it on a regular basis. That will encourage search engines and visitors to come to your site more often.
- Is you homepage one big graphic or a Flash animation? Large graphics and animation are hard for search engines to catalog, hard for the visually impaired to “read”, and hard for low bandwidth folks to download it. Consider a new, more text-friendly design if your homepage is more than 30% graphics – especially if that 30% is at the top.
- Add a site map. Search engines love them and many web users are turning to site maps the way readers turn to book indexes. A site map is just a list of links to the various pages in your site.
- Do you have dated pictures on your site? Get new ones and make them color photos – unless there’s a good reason to go black and white. Certainly don’t mix and match haphazardly. (And for smarty pants friends, I know the picture on my web site is 10 years old but I haven’t changed!)
Today’s Byte is for folks who have web sites. For the rest I say Happy Mother’s Day and/or don’t forget to call your mom! NetMechanic is an old favorite site. It seemed to disappear for a while so I lost track of it – but recently we have been reunited. NetMechanic runs tests on your web site to see how it’s running and how it compares to other sites. Here are a few of the tools you can try for free on NetMechanic:
HTML Tool box
Enter your URL and it will test up to 5 of your pages for free. It tests the basics: spelling, HTML code, links, and load time.
GIFbot
Upload your web images and GIFbot will optimize them – giving you several options to choose. Each image includes download time so that you can decide how to balance quality of image with time to download.
Search Engine Submission
Enter your URL and information on content and they will submit your site to up to 12 search engines. Normally I would be skeptical of a bulk submission tool – but NetMechanic doesn’t make any promises and they report on their submission success. (You wouldn’t’ want to do this more than once every 2-3 months.)
