E-mail service can be (virtually) free

There are tons of freebies on the Internet. You can have free information -- so much of it, actually, that you can get overloaded in just a few minutes. You can have free entertainment -- some decent and some less so. You can have free music -- some you can legally download and some is not for you if you are a law-abiding individual. And you can have free e-mail services.

People agree that e-mail is the killer application that has brought them in hordes to the Internet. Long before the World Wide Web was invented, and long before browsers became a weapon for competition, e-mail was there. It helped people communicate across the world without having to pay international phone charges.

Internet portals, which always strive to build the largest community that will continuously flock to their sites, capitalize on the people's need for e-mail services. Therefore, to draw as many Internet users to their websites as possible, one of the first things they offer is a free e-mail service. Aside from these portals, there are also websites that specialize in providing e-mail and other goodies, including chat rooms, news highlights and ads.

Just recently, CNET listed four free e-mail providers that it considered to be the top players in the world today: Yahoo Mail, Microsoft Hotmail, Juno WebMail and Mail.com. But you do not have to sign up with these services. Here in Indonesia we also have a lot of free e-mail services available.

What do you have to give in return? As every outgoing message will have a promotion line or two at the bottom, you will be their "viral marketer". Each time you send an e-mail, you promote the free e-mail service to your recipient. Which is not really that bad, actually.

Leading Indonesian news portals like Detik.com and Astaga.com both offer free e-mail services. Registration for an e-mail account is straightforward. Those who do not read English very well yet will also find it especially helpful as everything is in Bahasa Indonesia. It took me less than five minutes, including a wrong click, to get a Detik.com e-mail account.

eKilat.com is an interesting fee e-mail website. Not only does it give you as many e-mail accounts as you want, it also allows you to access your e-mail stored on an external mail server. For example, from within eKilat.com I can access all my e-mail in CBNNet's POP server.

Another free e-mail service that you should look at is Bolehmail from BolehNet. Its interface is more intuitive and I found that the sites generally responded faster to my mouse clicks.

Most of these free e-mail services are Web-based, although Yahoo Mail works with e-mail client programs such as Eudora and Outlook Express. Web-based means that you access your e-mail with a browser such as Internet Explorer or Netscape. The good thing about it is that you can access your e-mail from any computer in any Internet cafe anywhere in the world. If you insist on using Outlook Express to handle your e-mail, your only choice is between Microsoft Hotmail and Yahoo Mail.

Here are some questions you should be asking yourself in choosing a free e-mail service: Does it allow you to send and receive e-mails with attachments? What is the maximum size of a file that can be downloaded? ekilat allows you to download files up to 4 MB in size. Also important is how big is the storage that you can use. Mail.com, to which I have paid US$50 for a lifetime e-mail address, allocates 5 MB storage. It's just too bad Mail.com is clunky and lacks up-to-date features.

Also important are advanced tools such as the filter that will keep spams and other unwanted messages out of the gate. Sometimes you also need the Blind Carbon Copy (BCC) to send messages to multiple recipients without displaying their addresses on top of the message.

Finally, before deciding on which free e-mail service you will print on your business card, test each one of them. See which one has the easiest access to basic functions such as Reply and Forward. (Zatni Arbi)