Cybersurf: Valentines Day and web mail issues

Monday, February 14, 2005

Valentines Day and web mail issues

Hello, good morning and welcome to Cybersurf, your weekly window where web matters. I am your Cyberhost Steven Lang in a somewhat romantic frame of mind – it is, after all, Valentine’s day.

Now, just in case you have forgotten this very important day on our calendar, you can always got to cards.co.za and send your loved one an online Valentines day card. If you suspect that the virtual offerening will not please her, then you can always go to flowers.co.za where they have a special section on Valentine’s day bouquets. Surprise surprise!

What will surprise you even more are the prices – a dozen red roses wrapped in cellophane – R325 – free delivery. How about 24 red roses in a glass vase – R725. And these are only the more affordable options.

Just for the fun of it, I typed in Valentines.co.za and the browser took me straight back to cards.co.za.

In Google – I typed in Valentines day and got a wide selection of sites related to the history of St Valentines, and how the day is commemorated in other countries – but I also got a whole host of paid for links down the right hand side of the browser.

Let’s do a handbrake turn now and re-visit the free webmail wars.

A few months ago, I mentioned Google’s new webmail service called gmail. Initially I tried it with a degree of trepidation – good ideas come and go on the ‘net with the greastest of ease.

But I have used it more and more and found that it has become an integral part of my internet experience. The biggest single advantage of gmail is that it offers a mamoth one gig of storage space. This is a huge amount, and I have sent and received zillions of big messages with audiofiles and large photo files and I have still only used seven percent of my allocation.

It has a useful option to create as many folders as you want. This allows you to manage your files more effectively, and if you still can’t remember where you put something, then you can use a Google search to go through your own mail.

It is great – But!

But it doesn’t have a calendar function like yahoo mail.

Yahoo recently upped its storage space to 250 megabytes in response to Google’s challenge, and Yahoo does offer more add-ons that you would expect to find on an e-mail client.

I tried several local, free webmails but found that they asked too many personal questions and offered less storage space – Ananzi even asked me to phone in for a security number.

So for the meantime, I am sticking to gmail, and soon I will test their lastest offering which they say will allow you to access gmail through your normal e-mail client - in most cases some version of Outlook.

But even the days of Outlook could be numbered. This week I aim to test Thunderbird – a free e-mail client from the house of Mozilla.

The same people who gave us the open source Firefox browser.

That’s a wrap for the Valentine’s day edition of Cybersurf. If you would like to read the script of this programme please go to cybersurf.blogspot.com – one more time – cybersurf.blogspot.com.

Thanks for listening and remember to keeeeep on surfing.

// posted by Steven Lang @ 4:01 pm

Comments:

Hi Steven, just to let you know that your link on the top right to the SAfm page is broken. It seems to link to 'www.SAfm' instead of 'www.SAfm.co.za'.

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