anyone else having trouble getting into hotmail now that they've changed to windows live? All I get is either a white blank screen, or if I scroll back and forth, the page outline with no info... Why can't they just leave well enough alone! I can log into mail box, but then nothing!

It's time.

gmail.google.com

No invite required, 20 Mb attachments, ability to send as any number of your e-mail aliases, etc...

**Sorry Roger. I had some time to help. In the Airport now. If it were me, I would package it Express Mail, include a cardboard sleeve to keep things looking nice, and two copies of the CD.

Done, first thing Monday, it can get there Tues @ 10:00.

Gmail is definitely superior to Hotmail/MSN in every way. I'm not sure why people would even sign up for a Hotmail account now. OK, I just came up with one reason: I posted something on a web forum where I needed to post an email address right on the website (an invitation for spam bots to slurp up your address) so I got a temporary Hotmail address for that only. Let Hotmail get the extra spam after I'm done with this account!

Several other friends of mine had had issues with Hotmail and dumped it for Gmail. Of course, there's the pain of changing your email address. If this is an issue for you, I highly suggest you get your own domain (for about $10/year) and forward your email to your Gmail/Hotmail/whatever account, but only use your domain - YOURNAME@YOURDOMAINNAME.com - for your email address. Then if you get sick of Gmail, change the domain forwarding to go to some other email account. And NEVER need to change your email address again!

Andrew

Andrew,

That works well! I have my own domain and if I need to put an email address out where it could be spammed or such, I just go in and create a new email address at my domain name.

I have them all set up to forward to my "real" email address and if I see a lot of spam from one, I just go in and delete that email address.

Also, if I'm signing up for something I'm not sure of, but want to check out anyway, I'll set up a new email address using the name of whatever I'm setting up.

For example, if I was signing up for pxdradio for the first time and wasn't sure about it, I'd set up an email address; pdxradio@mydomain.com. That way if I start getting a lot of spam, I know where it came from.

BTW, gmail is great. You can even forward other emails to your gmail address and if you reply to the email on the gmail server, it will look like you replied from your original email address. (Which I guess can be bad or good!)

Pretty cool stuff.

Yeah I have my own domain too (several). But I still used Hotmail in my example above because I didn't really need any unnecessary email (spam) showing up to my server. I need this Hotmail address only temporarily - then I'll dump it.

Both Hotmail and Yahoo now allow you to send "as another email address" (e.g. with your domain name) by the way. Gmail has had this feature for a long time - I've used it almost since the day they introduced it about two years ago.

Andrew

I get the rare pleasure of being able to use Gmail professionally.

It's hilarious watching the Outlook geeks struggle with organizing everything, when a fraction of that time spent with labels and filters essentially does it while you read.

The most common complaint is not being able to deal with mail offline. Google desktop does this, but I don't use it.

Frankly, my e-mail time is so productive, I really don't miss offline queuing. It's just not necessary a very high percentage of the time.

Shared calendars, among gmail users are more than capable now, and they interoperate with Outlook users. (this is what lets me use gmail professionally.)

I dread having to ever deal with e-mail Outlook style again.

It's that good.

Missing, out of curiosity, have you had to sync any Google Calendars to a Pocket PC Outlook calendar? I'm helping someone with that this week. I'm going to try to use Oggsync. (Goosync uses a 3rd-party server, Oggsync doesn't.) Any experience with either of these, by chance?

Andrew

Nope.

Thankfully, I've largely been spared the joys of syncing.

I'm rapidly growing to be a complete PDA luddite. So far, they've been more trouble than they are worth.

Post if that ends up working though. Would be nice to file away for a rainy day.

More trouble than they are worth: roger that! I don't have one, I'm doing this for someone who HAS to have one.

Andrew

I feel for the two of you!

the suck part is I have another hotmail account that opens fine, the one I need to get in to has become the problem. It starts to load then whn I try to open it everything disappears.....

Ran virus pgms to make sure nothing was hiding........ went to library and same problem so it's them rather than me... now , how to access it???????????

I dumped my Hotmail almost a year ago, favouring Google Mail...........

Haven't had any problem with Google since.

[EDIT: something that sounded kind of like a commercial.]

Incidentally, I have been considering starting up a file on Hushmail. Has anyone else heard about it, read reports, used it etc. and how well does it perform, typically?

What really sux is Vista!

As far as I am concerned, Vista is merely a blatant attempt for Micro$oft to try to grab up the Linux and Apple markets by giving a beautiful-looking OS (it really is, I think; certainly more visually-attractive than my 98) but with very little practical functionality. Kinda' a type of "bait and switch" technique. (I took an opportunity to use a Vista machine recently; had a lot of trouble running my copy of Sim Copter--a 98 programme--and DOS support in WV seems to be practically nonexistant.)

That, and it appears the technical demands for the OS are unusually high. Apparently you have to use "Microsoft-certified" hardware (i.e. marked up for far more $$$ than the hardware is really worth) in order for most functions of the OS to even run properly. Oh yeah, and reportedly even a basic installation of Vista eats up about 8GB of hard drive space.

My 98 only occupies about 150MB (yes, MB as in MEGAbytes) of hard drive space and on my 3GHz Pentium IV I can get it fully booted up in about 20 seconds. (Unfortunately this puts it at an unfair advantage over my current installation of Mandrake 10, which takes at least a minute to boot up completely.)

I saw somebody wearing a T-shirt recently that seems to speak the truth. "Free up disk space. Delete Windows." ;o)

Vista really does suck. I forget whether I've shared my story here about trying to setup a Toshiba laptop with Vista for someone. It was pretty, but it did not seem reliable and had compatibility issues. I'm hoping never to move to Vista, actually. I hope either to move to Ubuntu Linux for 90% of what I need and just use XP for the other 10%, for a long time.

MS put out Vista obviously as a marketing gimmick. Let's face it, after 6 years of XP they needed SOMETHING new. Mac's OSX is clearly cooler looking (although I personally don't like it). MS needed to avoid the perception that they were TOO far behind.

Ubuntu Linux is pretty good as stated a few times. Not perfect but pretty good. You can try it out with a live CD at http://www.ubuntu.com and boot the CD without installing it - but it runs Firefox, etc.

Andrew

Andrew~

The 90/10 ratio is pretty much how I do it, too. (Sim City 3000 and Sim Copter won't run properly under Wine running on my Mandrake system--I've tried it. Supposedly there is a Linux patch to make SC3000 run but I haven't tried that [yet...])

I have been thinking long and hard lately about converting the Mandrake section of my machine to Ubuntu, but my neighbour's on holiday this month and I haven't had access to his DSL line as a result! :o(

Meanwhile, about a month ago at work, DMX Music sent us a new "Profusion" system to replace the aging (and ailing) CD-Interactive system they had been using for at least the past 15 years. (I actually have the machine in my posession now: it's the Plextor PB-6025 I mentioned in my profile. With some adjustment and a new CD drive she seems to work like a brand new machine now.) Much to my delight a week ago I discovered the Profusion is a fully Linux-based machine. (Not certain which type but it sort of looks like Mandrake.) I haven't had a chance to play with it extensively yet (I have this week off) but I hope to soon......