Me and my dumb questions.

Legacy_user

I have Outlook Express for email, but because Wanadoo (my ISP) has email facilities which identify Spam giving you the opportunity to clic "delete spam", I use that.

Were I to cancel with wanadoo in favour of a cheaper provider, ie fast4, would that mean I no longer received email via wanadoo. I have quite a number of important saved email messages in a folder, not to mention addresses in the address book.

If I were to loose this facility, maybe I could move them elsewhere if it were not too difficult.

Xtreme

Where do you click "delete spam" on OE or in the wanadoo wenmail facility ?

you can export your address book in Outlook express , quite easily.

DonnyDave

I presume you have an account where you pay a monthly fee, ie not a pay as you go one. You can change your Wanadoo account to a pay as you go one. You will need to dial in to it every 90 days (I think). Check the cut off period to be sure.

The PAYG dial-up gives you a backup if your regular ISP is down.

You can retrieve your email from your Wanadoo email address whilst connected via another ISP. You may find you can't send, but tweaking the settings in Outlook Express will fix that one.

Bear in mind that if you do choose to dump your Wanadoo address you will have to give your contacts the new address.

As far as spam goes, it may be worth using your a separate (ie your new) email address for personal contacts only. Spammers tend to harvest email addresses from the internet, so avoid putting it on web pages etc. You are not guaranteed to receive spam. Never open spam, this can confirm your email addresses exists and they send you more!

I've got a Freeserve address which prefixes the subject line with "SPAM". I receive the spam into OE and use rules to move it into a separate 'Spam' OE folder.

Also, with Wanadoo/Freeserve (and some other ISPs), you can create as many email addresses as you want if your username is of the form name@username.wanadoo. etc. So for personal contacts you may use yourname@username.wana... You can then use rules to separate these out. So, for example, when I receive a reply in a forum, the mail is put into a 'Forums' folder in OE because it is sent to 'forums@...' Let me know if you want more info on how to do this.

As far as your address book goes, if it's the one in Outlook Express then that won't make any difference. It's worth backing it up just incase the worst happens with your computer.

mike_paterson

Donny Dave has summed it up pretty well.

If I was you, I'd do as he suggests and convert your current account to Pay as you Go. I'd also set up a Gmail account (PM me as I have an invite spare) and use the Gmail account as your main account. Gmail has anti spam software and also supports POP3 which means that you can use outlook express to manage your email.
I would then a) set up a forwarding rule to forward mail from your Pay as you Go account to your gmail account , b) set up an auto reply email on your Pay as you go account to tell people that you have a new email address, and c) tell all your contacts your new address.

Hope this helps - let me know if you want an invite

Rgds
Mike

DonnyDave

You may also consider registering your own domain name. You don't have to put a website on it, just use it for email. That way you can keep it for life, providing you keep renewing it. Prices vary, but you can have your own .uk address for a couple of pounds per year.

FangKat

re DonnyDave's - it is a good idea - 123reg (google for it) do it cheap I do know cos got one of mine there.


by the way, consider dumping outlook express and maybe try one of the Mozillas - seems much safer and Thunderbird (mail) has anti spam built in.

and Firefox for your browser instead of I.E.

alexj2002

I have my own domain name (1and1.co.uk charge £1.99 a year for .co.uk and .me.uk addresses) which auto-forwards to GMail which I then check in Thunderbird.

DonnyDave

I'm with 1&1 aswell. £1.99+VAT per annum for a domain name. UK names are registered for 2 years, see Nominet who keep track of all the .uk addresses.