Emailing From Anywhere!!! by
Gary Woods

Email has become ubiquitous in most of our lives so much so that we hate to be kept apart from it for too long. If you wander around the globe regularly and don't want to tote your laptop computer, but do want to still use the features of Outlook there's a service that will allow you to do so. For $45 per year you can bring all of Outlook's features with you anywhere via your MSN or Hotmail accounts. Just like Desktop Outlook you can view and manage multiple e-mail accounts, calendars, contacts and tasks. The only real downside is you have only 2 GB of space to store stuff and outgoing email can be no larger than 20 MB. Check it out http://outlooklive.msn.com.

Outlooklive is an outgrowth of Microsoft's free Windows Live service. You can connect to your Hotmail account, get news feeds, and store Internet Explorer and Firefox bookmarks online. There's even a web-hosted Messenger IM client. You can see it at www.live.com

The real champ of Internet Email is of course Google's Gmail service. Since its debut in 2004 it's free and ushered in a new Web age with its slick, quick interface, as well as its spam filter and abundant storage. Gmail gives you a whopping 3 GB per account. With that kind of space you can backup files and pictures then organize and search them using tag-like labels. Both Hotmail and Yahoo are working on similar Gmail-like features for their services.

If you have any suggestions or questions for me please drop me a note at garyandlaury@santabarbaraproperties.com or see my column on the Internet at http://www.santabarbaraproperties.com or call me at (805) 729-0910