The Four-eyed Journal » free_webmail

Hotmail breaks the 1GB upgrade silence

jhay — Thu, 21 Dec 2006 01:01:46 +0000

Alas, the guys from MSN have broken their silence have e-mailed Hotmail users that their storage space have been upgraded from 250MB to 1GB (which is the standard nowadays, I think).

What was good is even better

You want more storage? You got itâ€”1 GB.

Soon you’ll be seeing your MSNÂ® HotmailÂ® account change for the better as we make the transition to Windows Liveâ„¢ Mail. As part of this evolution, your Hotmail inbox capacity just increased from 250 MB to a full 1 GBâ€”giving you more free space to stash messages and store photos, and requiring less deleting of items you’d rather save for later.

And more storage is just the beginning. Once the transition to Windows Live Mail is complete(highlights are mine), your benefits will include:

* A clean new designâ€“ choose your own colors and layout.
* 2 GB of storage â€“ even more photos, more messages, more everything
* Enhanced securityâ€“color codes for suspicious e-mail.

The message was dated December 13, 2006 but we Hotmail users have been already aware of this upgrade as far back as last November when they made this upgrade in silence.

What’s interesting about this however, is the line that I highlighted above. So we’re still in the transition from Hotmail or MSN to Windows LIVE. Once that is complete, we Hotmail users would become automatic Windows LIVE MAIL users in the near future. So what else is new?

A 2GB storage space? Not so shabby, but GMail has already broken and left that mark and has almost reached the 3GB mark, right where Walla! mail is right now. This a bit snobbish attitude of mine probably stems from my lack of interest and enthusiasm in Windows LIVE and its components like LIVE Mail. Which I think has its roots from my bigger lack of interest in Windows Vista. But that is another story.

I sort of like Hotmail for what and where it is right now, which is not great as Aja once pointed out:

I remember using Hotmail the first years of my Web experience but dropped it due to Yahoo! Mailâ€™s integration with Yahoo! Messenger, which I use frequently. But soon after I got hold of a Gmail invite, I switched totally and just left my Yahoo! Mail account for Web site sign ups and registrations [sort of like semi-spam mailbox]. And, now I use Gmail for my [actually, your] domain.

Hotmail was really left behind in this competition, but isnâ€™t Windows Live Mail coming out soon?

Well said Aja, but Hotmail is still good though. Better now that it has been upgraded with a bigger storage space. Will transforming it to Windows LIVE Mail help it catch up to the competition? That remains to be seen.

1GB Hotmail launched silently

jhay — Thu, 16 Nov 2006 23:37:29 +0000

Way back in my high school freshman year, I signed up for my very very first e-mail service, it’s not with Yahoo! as like 99% of other classmates and friends did, it’s Hotmail-powered e-mail service. (http://www.hotmail.com) And no, it’s not ‘hotmale’ though I had a few contacts who found a good laugh out of me once I verbally told them my Hotmail address.

I don’t know, and maybe it is just me but Yahoo! Mail never caught my fancy. (To which I could write a whole new piece about, and that’s for later days.) A culprit could be from my self-obsession with always being different from everyone else (at least I try to be). Since most of my friends and classmates already have ‘@yahoo.com’ trailing their unique username with all sorts of special numbers and the words “cute, cutiee, pastel” and other incarnations to tell the world where to e-mail them. So I signed up for a Hotmail account.

The service was satisfactory and I even liked the cool blue-themed interface. It was rather simple to use and more intuitive compared to Yahoo! Mail (again this is just me). The only complaints I can throw at it is the size of the inbox, I’m not sure but when I first signed up for the service they were only offering 2MB (no kidding!) of space. Later on they upgraded it to 25MB and then up to 250MB. Aside from the very limited storage space, Hotmail required users to regularly sign-in to their accounts otherwise, if it were to be left untouched for a month, the account is temporarily suspended thereby causing the incoming messages to be lost in cyberspace forever. Never open you Hotmail account for more than two months and it’s completely wiped off their servers. Harsh and somehow a turn-off for most, it’s a good thing that you could always re-open another Hotmail account with your previous username, ergo you retain your original e-mail address. This eliminates the need for you to remind all your contacts of your new e-mail address afterwards.

I enjoyed using my Hotmail over the years and yes I did signed up for a Yahoo! Mail account but only for the sake of using their Yahoo! Messenger client. All my e-mail needs were served by Hotmail. Though now I’m a proud and loyal Gmail user, I still maintain my Hotmail account as a backup and in memory of the good old times I had with it.

Up to now I am a happy Hotmail user and others like me who use the service, would be surprised but delighted to know that the storage space has been upgraded (finally!) to a whopping (industry standard?) 1Gigabytes of inbox space. Yup, that’s 1GB of Hotmail glory still completely free. Surprised? I was too, for the upgrade was made in silence. Still, 1GB is 1GB and it’s definitely a welcomed upgrade.

How does the Gmail for your domain works?

jhay — Sat, 15 Jul 2006 15:04:11 +0000

Okay, I was so ecstatic with my post announcing that Gmail is now servicing my .com.ph e-mail accounts that it has left some readers (I deeply thank each and every one of you ) wondering how does it really work or how can one get Gmail working for their domain as well. I actually want to thank Rob for motivating me to share this experience for today’s post which is quite long and is divided into two parts:

First part:

Second part:

How Gmail for your domain greatly improves this system/process

Alright then, a little background info about e-mails and domains, from my experience and understading of course. Experts in this field can freely point out corrections in the comment thread below. There are two kinds of e-mail, free webmail and the not free webmail. The free webmail, like Yahoo! MSN’s Hotmail, Walla.com, and of course the cool Google or Gmail are just some examples in which a user could sign up for a free account. No more need to get your own domain, because you will get yourusername@Yahoo or Google or Hotmail etc .com. There is also no need for you to get your own webhost account as well, since the companies mentioned before offer that for free.

On the other hand, if you want to have your own e-mail address named after the domain of your choice you need to have your own domain + hosting which are provided by Ploghost.com, Dreamhost.com and NokiAHost.com etc and this is what I call the not free webmail.

The not free webmail is the e-mail service you get once you apply and pay for your own webhost + domain, example is this .com.ph domain. The domain http://jrocas.com.ph is sponsored by use.com.ph while the webhosting is sponsored by Ploghost.com, and so I could now create e-mail accounts with the addresses ending in name@jrocas.com.ph like jhay [at] jrocas [dot] com [dot] ph. Below is a screenshot of the e-mail accounts I’m referring to when viewed inside the Cpanel for your own domain + hosting.

Since it is hosted in your own domaim, it will be using up the disk space that comes with your webhosting package, usually 10MB should be enough (like in the sample in above photo), and to manage all the e-mails you send and recieve you can choose from either Horde or Squirrel Mail both are free and open-source webmail packages that comes built-in for your own domain + hosting. I find Horde easier to use but it’s really a matter of personal preferences. Below is the screenshot of the default webmail services I’ve mentioned, again once you logged in to your domain e-mail.

Since I got my .com.ph domain + hosting, I’ve been using Horde only to setup the mail forwarding settings which I will go to in detail later on. In the meantime, here is what it looks like inside Horde.

Everything clear so far? Alright then, now since I got my free Gmail account (jhaykage [at] gmail [dot] com) before I got my .com.ph domain + hosting and I’ve decided to use my new .com.ph e-mail: jhay [at] jrocas [dot] com [dot] ph as my default e-mail address, I need to move all of my contacts and important messages from the Gmail account to the new .com.ph e-mail account.

But I don’t want to do that, I want the best of both worlds. I want to keep using Gmail with all of its cool features and mindblowing storage space (over 2 GB and still counting!) while using my new jhay [at] jrocas [dot] com [dot] ph address all at the same time. This has been made possible thanks to a feature called mail forwarding and the ability of Gmail to handle all your other e-mail addresses as different accounts.

How? Again, logging in to my .com.ph + domain’s Cpanel, I can configure my native e-mail account (jhay at jrocas dot com dot ph) to forward all the e-mails it recieves to my Gmail account (jhaykage at gmail dot com). I now log in to my Gmail and proceed to creat a new account or “Send mail as:” profile which means you can use Gmail to send from your other email addresses. The actual process is really easy and can be summarized by the screencap below:

Using my old Gmail account and I can now send an recieve e-mail messages using the address jhay at jrocas dot com dot ph.

Whew! Finally done with the first part. Relax though, this second part is much shorter than the first. Okay then, Google’s ‘Gmail for your domain’ service makes this whole process of mail forwarding and configuring your Gmail accounts a whole lot faster and better.

How? It virtually combines your own domain and Google mail in one single webmail service. You would would have your very own Gmail account but not with the yourusername@gmail.com address, but with your own domain’s address instead, like mine which is jhay at jrocas dor com dot ph

No more configuring your host’s default webmail programs to forward e-mail to your Gmail account and no more setting up your Gmail account to send and recieve messages using your other e-mail addresses. Plus it frees you from the worries of monitoring how much limited webspace your e-mail has taken up because hey! You have all 2 GB plus more, at your e-mailing pleasure babe! (Pardon the language ) Finally, if your domain is a group domain or it belongs to your company or organization, you could Gmail accounts to your members (25 users max) as well so that all of you will have e-mail addresses ending with the domain of your group or company’s website. A powerful way to help promoting your domain and company if I may add.

So again, I hope I have made things clearer for everyone and if you have your own domain, or planning to get your own ( a .com.ph domain would be good if you’re a Filipino) you should opt to apply for this great and free service from Google and have Gmail for your domains.