Yahoo! Mail: One of the Best Internet Mail Providers
Written: Apr 03 '01
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Product Rating:
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Pros: free, easy to use, loads fast, pop access, mail forwarding, allows attachments, address book
Cons: no large files can be sent or received, mail from others can bounce
The Bottom Line: Get it if you need an email address.
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| pomona's Full Review: Yahoo! Mail |
General Overview
I’ve used Yahoo! Mail on and off for quite a while. At one point it was my primary mail provider, but currently I have an ISP account. However, I do keep one for my “other” mail, where I don’t want to disclose my primary email address.
There are lots of great features offered, and lots of customizable aspects. You can do everything from changing the color scheme of your page, to setting up your account as a forwarding or pop account. I find that not all the features really suit my needs though.
Yahoo Mail provides you with 6mb for storing your mail. So, it’s not ideal for anyone expecting to receive large amounts of mail, such as business, multiple discussion lists, and large files. But you can get around that, with exception to the large files part, by signing up for pop access, which is also free, provided you have a mail client such as Outlook Express and can follow the instructions for setting it up (will explain more about that later).
Upon signing in, Yahoo will list all the folders that contain new mail, and will tell you the percentage of space you are taking up out of the 6mb allotted space. That’s a good feature, because you don’t want to lose mail as Yahoo may delete old mail. The rest of the page, in my opinion, is wasted space. I almost never take the time to look at it. It’s mostly advertising from Yahoo or other companies.
The inbox will clearly display to you what mail is new, and what mail you have read. You can arrange this in ascending or descending order, by modifying your preferences. Also, you can customize how your name appears in your outgoing mail, specify a reply-to address, whether you want to view it as frames or not, let them know whether you want to save outgoing mail or not, and many other things. This can be a bit overwhelming with all the choices.
How I’ve Used Yahoo Mail
The basic use of Yahoo Mail among users is to receive mail, obviously. And that’s what I do. A couple years back I considered Yahoo my primary provider for email. I thought it was the best of what was around, and that would include such providers as Hotmail, and Mail.com. It loaded fast, and was easy to use. I valued that because I had a slow computer, and I didn’t want to wait for a bunch of graphical buttons to load. While on there, I received mail from friends, and one discussion list, but not much else. It was fine for my needs back then. I wasn’t sending or receiving large files, nor was I receiving large amounts of mail. It hasn’t changed too much in the past couple of years. It still loads fast, and is easy to use.
After a while, I figured out that I could have an account on my ISP in addition to the main account, and have my own inbox on my computer. My use of Yahoo mail diminished. I checked it every now and then during my transition from internet account to ISP account. Then it seemed to halt for a while. (My own personal choice to switch, may not be the best for you.)
I still had interest in it though, and always kept an account alive “just in case”. And soon I was able to find a use. Last year or the year before that, my ISP had email unavailable to all customers for a month or two, due to some upgrades to the servers. I had to have an alternate means of keeping in contact with people. Yahoo was my choice.
By that time, Yahoo had set up a feature to give people free pop access, or free forwarding. I actually had pop access set up already, and was able to jump right in. All I had to do was compose a mail under my Yahoo address in Outlook Express, and send it on it’s way. Before this can actually be done, you have to set up the account in whatever mail client you have with the pop and smtp addresses, and user name and password.
Sending and receiving mail through Outlook Express was easy. I actually prefer using that, instead of through the internet. I can store large amounts of mail, far exceeding what Yahoo gave me, and access the mail while offline. Of course, after that was over with, I went back to my ISP account. However, this time I am still using it for receiving mail from services that ask me for an email address, to prevent my address from being spam infested. Epinions is an exception.
Don't forget all the other features you can use with your Yahoo ID and password. Yahoo! Chat, Yahoo! Messenger, and Yahoo! Geocities are just a few.
The Bad
I don’t like that I can’t send or receive large file attachments on Yahoo. One time I tried to send a friend that uses Yahoo an MP3 that was over 2mb. Yup, it got returned. I assume she had a lot of stored messages, and that 2mb was just over the limit. However, the limit for Yahoo members sending files is 1.5mb and it could be the same for receiving. This won’t seem bad if you don’t send large files like that. An alternative to sending large files is to upload them to an online hard drive and share them with the recipient.
Sometimes, mail sent to a Yahoo member will bounce. This only happened once or twice when I sent mail to previously mentioned friend, so I assume it doesn’t happen that often if you clean up your inbox once in a while. However, I manage a discussion list and one of the most popular domains that bounces is Yahoo, with the other one being AOL. It must be stressed that people clean out their inboxes, especially when you are subscribed to any number of discussion lists. Delete messages that aren’t important, or even print out messages that are important and then delete them. Although, there is an option to upgrade your account to “premium” with 25mb of space. I would never pay for extra space unless I absolutely needed it.
Conclusion
Yahoo is one of the best mail providers out there. I would recommend it to anyone who wants to have an email address to correspond with friends and family or even use it as a secondary email address when you don’t want to give out your primary address. A lot of my friends and family use it as their primary address. It provides all the features you would need, and more. You never know when you will need a backup account. I would be using it as my primary address if I didn’t like my ISP account so much! Just make sure it is the right choice for you.
Recommended:
Yes
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Epinions.com ID:
pomona
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Member: Kim
Location: Connecticut
Reviews written: 17
Trusted by: 19 members
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