Most people start with a web based email account like "Hotmail", "Yahoo" or "AOL" (if they are your Internet service provider ).

The advantage of this type of email account is that you can collect your email from anywhere in the world.

The drawback with these "free" accounts is that they are advertising supported and have other limitations. You either have to run the gauntlet of pop-up adverts on their web site or you have to carry a tag line at the bottom of each email you send. Another drawback is that you have to be connected to the internet before you can read your email. If you are a dial-up user or a laptop user and are not connected to the Net then you won't be able to see any emails, including your old, sent or received emails.

To get around this problem a lot of people use Outlook Express. This program allows you to store all you email on your own desktop or laptop. You are not limited to the mailbox size restrictions that would have applied on a web based account, and you are able to prepare emails on the bus or train (or car if you are not driving) and then simply dispatch them when you can connect to the Net.

To use Outlook Express you need to know a little about your service provider's mail server. CompuGuide can assist you with this process and configure Outlook to retrieve and sort your emails automatically. You can operate more than one email account and have all the emails delivered into Outlook Express simultaneously. You can even configure it to allow you to choose which account you want to send your emails from, for each email you send; e.g. let's suppose you have a private email account for family and friends and another for work. Outlook Express can be configured to collect emails from both and to file them into two different folders, one marked Private and the other Work. When you send an email there is a new field called "From" that allows you to select which account the email is to be sent from.

The above illustrates couple of variations in email solutions - there are many more and the likelihood is that there is a better one for you, than the one you are currently using. Let CompuGuide recommend one for you.