Just a heads up for those of you who use Hotmail to pull your POP mail from your real ISP...might want to make other plans... Microsoft are emailing Hotmail POP users informing them of another erosion to the free service: "Dear MSN® Hotmail® User: We are sorry to inform you that as of July 16, 2002, we will no longer be able to offer POP Mail Retrieval to our Hotmail users with a standard free account. This means that you will not be able to aggregate e-mail from various accounts into a single Hotmail account. If you would like to continue to use this feature, you can sign up for MSN Extra Storage. "
Hotmail sucks. I have had an account with them for a while, and all I ever get on it now is spam. They never provided POP3 access with a mail client like Outlook Express or Eudora, the format sucks and takes too long to move mail around or delete it, and now they remove this function. Screw it, I will stick to my Yahoo account (even though they removed POP3 access as well ) and my ISP account.
they've actually already started to phase some addresses out, as far as POP3 filtering goes... I used to have about 5 Hotmail accounts all downloading into OE, now I've got 1 that actually works, all the others crapped out about a month ago... oh well, it was fun while it lasted.
I've been using Hotmail's web-based email service, and I'm getting tired of them. It's not due to the spam b/c I get very little spam (and I don't even use the junk mail filter), it's due to their server malfunctioning an awful lot recently...some of my emails don't go through. I'm about to switch to SoftHome's free email service (including POP and a 16MB limit I believe); I've heard they were good.
SoftHome sounds good, until they decide to discontinue service... Personal Email is free. Some of its features are POP and SMTP for compatibility with all standards-compliant email programs. Web-based email for mobility and simplicity. A generous 15MB/500 message quota. 45MB/month transfer quota. It's free! It does have its restrictions, however: Our sponsors pay for your use via advertisements. Commercial use not allowed. At most 10 recipients per message. Bandwidth quotas strictly enforced. Expires after three months of disuse. Old messages expire. Frequency of checking for new messages restricted. ---- SoftHome website new acounts for SoftHome go here
This doesn't include e-mail forwarding, right? My school forwards e-mail to alumni accounts to a different e-mail account you designate. I've been using hotmail, but it's not like the e-mails are downloaded straight from a POP3 server (I think.) Should be fine, right? I second the request for other free e-mail services. Maybe I should check out Yahoo.
I think you'll be ok. Just make sure to use the account once a month... I think they deactivate it if you don't use it for 30 days.
