If you use the internet to any degree, especially if you use your email account, having a backup for emergencies would seem to be a good idea. Since there are approximately 183 Billion emails sent daily to the 1.3 Billion email users on earth (of which 70-72% are spam or viruses), it would seem that ‘everybody’ uses email. Email has supplanted 1^st class mail for business to a surprising degree…

In my blog, I will be handing out a lot of unsolicited advice; this may be the first of these jewels… You need to have a spare email address. There are some things to keep in mind when setting up a ‘backstop’ email account. The first one is to use it very rarely, this will help keep down spam, and to rarely or never give the address to anyone (save for some immediate family or very close friends).

Why all the cloak and dagger? Well, the answer is actually quite simple…it is to keep this account ‘clean’ from viruses, spam, and all of the assorted trash you may have in your regular email account. I should say that this is not a crucial thing to do, just a good thing to have taken care of… In the same manner that having any sort of emergency preparedness is worthwhile.

So, there are quite a few places to pick up a free email account… If you are really paranoid an think that the ‘man’ is always after you, there are free email accounts to be gotten in some foreign countries (relatively obscure and slow…), to some of the big players out there: Google, Yahoo, and MSN.

All three of these companies provide some good service of the money (i.e. free…). Google’s mail account, Gmail is one I have been using for five years, Yahoo is a service that I have had for about ten years (it has fewer extras with the account, but works fine…), and MSN (also called Hotmail…) is the Microsoft version of a free email account, years ago this free service had a nasty connotation with spam and illicit traffic, but for the last several years it has been a very nice service, and as with Google, there are a lot of worthwhile extras you can subscribe to with this account.

All three of these services work well, and because there is so much traffic related to these domains there is something to be said about the security in ‘hiding in with the rest of the herd’. These three services have so many value-added extras that you could even consider picking up more than one extra mail address (I have…at least four…). While all three of these services can be accessed from anywhere with a web browser, there is the added security in that your emails can be stored far from your home, computer, or even your internet service provider (a little bit more of security here…).

The real problem for many is how to conveniently access all of these new email accounts… Depending upon which email client you use (Windows Mail, Outlook, Outlook Express, Thunderbird, etc.) you will be able to integrate these extra accounts into your computer’s email setup. To do this, just search for the name of your email program (e.g. Outlook Express) and/or your new email account provider (e.g. Gmail), in either case you will soon find a number of websites that will walk you through setting up your new email accounts.

Finally there is another way you could accomplish keeping tabs on your new email accounts. That would be by using a (free!) program to do just that (keep track of your email accounts, as well as a number of other related tasks). The programs that I have used; Digsby (free), and Trillian ($) do this quite well.

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