With so many sites on the net offering free email service, how do you decide which one to use? Some sites even offer you money for registering and using their email facilities. (Of course you have to bear their advertisements). However more than money, I would prefer security and virus protection from my email provider.
When I was new to the net I had heard the name of hotmail a lot, so I decided to register, only to repent later on. After using hotmail I tried various other sites such as yahoo.com, mail.com, rediffmail.com and found yahoo mail to be the best.
The reasons because of which I feel Yahoo is the best are:
1) Security: Yahoo has built in Norton Antivirus scan. So before you download any attachments, the virus scan is run and it detects if any viruses are present.
2) Speed: The site opens very quickly i.e. the pages don’t take ages to load.
3) You don’t receive any unsolicited or junk mail.
4) Yahoo account can even be configured in Outlook Express. So messages can be downloaded and read offline. However the Norton Antivirus scan is not done when the mails are being downloaded through Outlook Express.
Other standard feature include, blocking senders (if required), Yahoo messenger for chatting and 6MB account space.
Besides, messages are sent and received almost instantaneously.
The two basic drawbacks with hotmail (slow loading of pages and junk mail) are not present in yahoo. I haven’t received a single junk mail at my yahoo email. Although rediff is very fast, it does not have any built-in Antivirus and it cannot be configured in outlook express. Besides, I had a very odd experience with rediff mail. As you all might agree, “First impression is the last impression.” The day I registered myself at rediffmail, I clicked on the “Contact Us” link and typed a message asking them whether I could configure my rediff account in my Outlook Express? After typing the message, I clicked on “send”. The very next day when I checked my mails, I found a mail titled “Message could not be delivered” from “Mail Damon”. I was very surprised… however; I sent the same message again and received a reply only after two days! Even though I haven’t faced any problem with rediff after this event, I somehow don’t feel like using it.
Drawbacks of yahoo: The yahoo server offlate has been down many times. However because of the fantastic service yahoo has been providing, with very good facilities, by now, I am such a staunch supporter of yahoo that this thing hasn’t quite deterred me from writing a good review for yahoo mail.
One of the other drawbacks is that when you are sending messages from yahoo account through outlook express, the server rejects the messages to be sent at the first attempt. These messages are sent only at the second attempt. This always happens while sending messages.
Anyway, I feel that the good points shadow these drawbacks, and everybody should use yahoo.