“The RoseBouquet”

If your experience with email has been limited to just your Outlook on your computer, connected to your ISP provider’s email service, or to a Hotmail or yahoo webmail address, you might not realize that there are loads of other options.

When you get a registered domain (from $4.99 to 9.99) and hosting for your domain ($12/year from me) you can make up all the email addresses you like from within your hosting admin area.

With each domain email address you can have an array of options. You can set up your Outlook or Netscape email program to fetch and show you your emails and also to send from each and every one of your addresses. Or, you can go online to a URL connected to your domain, and there choose from three different web mail programs to handle your email right there online. My domains come with your choice of Horde, Squirrel, and RoundCube. (If you know how to install these, you can set them up on some other hosting service too - IF you have access to the admin area, and can ftp, as most are free).

Now it’s up to you whether you just use the domain/hosting for email or also put up a web site. But if all that is still way over your head, here are some other options.

You can download some free email programs to screen and handle all your emails right there on your computer at home. I loved Pegasus Mail (also known as PMail) when I used a Windows 98 platform. Now I use KMail, but it’s for Linux platforms only. Thunderbird by Mozilla is considered a great one by some. It works on either Windows or Linux.

Then yesterday, while checking into this for a friend, I remembered that Opera is a free browser for either Windows or Linux and it comes with an email program built in. www.Opera.com I use it occasionally to see how a web page looks in something other than Firefox, my preferred browser, but this Opera is not hard to get to like.

This morning I was thinking about this friend who wanted a way to access her ISP email from another site. Ah-ha. Yes, my Excite account. I use that when signing up for something that I fear is going to give me a lot of unwanted mail, and I only check it occasionally. (It gives me 125 MB of space on my free account). I went to look and sure enough. Excite allows you to set up other POP3 accounts so that you can receive and deal with your email right there. www.excite.com (I think I like it better than Yahoo).