gmail

Have you heard about gmail? It's google's new e-mail offering. They're trying to change the way people reference the data in their e-mail. If you've ever tried to find something in one of your e-mail folders, you'll understand the problem. gmail addresses this by using google's search engine to index and search your e-mail. Further they allow each user to have 1 gigabyte of e-mail stored. This is a HUGE amount of e-mail. This means that you pretty much don't delete e-mail but just "archive" it.

And gmail is free. But, gmail is still in the beta testing phase so it is limited to membership by invitation. Not to worry, go to eBay and bid on one. I bought 3 for less than $4 total. And you don't get the advertising signatures like Juno. Just targeted (yes, they scan your e-mail) ads down the right side when you're reading the e-mail.

Remember it is still beta so it burps now and then. Their spam filters aren't up to my Bayesian filter in Outlook. It does have some nice features that let you set an alternative reply address. I use this to try to keep people sending e-mail to my desotonet.com address which is easier to redirect as needed. I even use my desotonet.com mail server to "clone" my e-mail to my bellsouth.net account and to gmail.com! That way, it shows up in both places. (An interesting side effect is that I get to see what the bellsouth.net spam filters keep out. They're pretty good.)