email services

Microsoft provide an email service called Windows live mail. The service costs £15 per annum to use. This is unusual as most email services are free to use.Windows live is a web based service. This means that it is possible to access from any computer as long as it has an internet connection. This is advantagous as it means that people can send and receive emails wherever they are.
Windows live has got a 10GB file size limit. This is very useful because it would require numerous very large files to overload it. That means that large images and movies can be attached to emails and sent and received without causing trouble.

Upon logging in a page is displayed thats shows any updates since the last time you logged on. This includes if there is anything in your inbox and any posts on a social net working site that refer to you. This is very useful as it means that people can immediately see anything that might interest them without having to go through multiple links.







When an email is received there are many options available as to what to do with it including basic replies and forward. There are also options to mark it as Junk. This moves the email to the junk folder and can add the address that email came from to the blocked list which prevents any more emails from that address bring received. It can also be flagged. This means that the email is moved to the flagged folder. This is very useful as it enables people to keep all of their important emails in one folder instead of sorting through hte whole in box to find it.
Windows live has a very useful spam filter built into it. It is very efficant in that I have received only a minimul number of spam enmails in all the years I have been using it. This is very useful as I do not have to sort through a lot of garbage to find what is important.

There is also a feature called contacts. This is so that it is possible to type in information about a person and the computer will remember them. This information can include contact details and personal information. This is useful because it means that people do not have to try and remember all the details. Another useful feature is that when a new email is being typed it is possible to open the contacts information to quickly find the email address of the person you want to send the email to.

Another email provider service is orange. This is a free service, which in my mind is vastly inferior to Windows Live Mail. The file size limit is 5MB. This is not good because anything with pictures can quickly overload it preventing new emails from being received. Also this limit is never updated and because file sizes are increasnig in size this means that even fewer emails can not be received.

This problem is not helped by the amount of spam emails received.Everyday approxiamtely 25 junk emails arrive in the Inbox. These can be marked as junk which moves them from the inbox to the junk folder. However marking emails as junk does not help as the next day there are more. There is a feature which enables email address to be blocked and any messages received from those sites get deleted immediately. However the blocked list can only contain 100 addresses.

 This is useless because of the problem of "botnets". A botnet is where a number of computers with internet access are hacked into and controlled by the hacker. The computers can then be used to all send out spam emails from all different addresses. A botnet can in theory contain an unlimited number of computres. As orange can only block 100 addresses that feature is useless against botnets.

This problem is made worse by the fact that orange does not seem to have any filter services against spam emails and it views every email recieved as legitamate. It can take a very long ime to clear all the spam from an inbox, especially when making sure not to delete legitamate emails.

Orange is also highly tempermental. Sometimes when someone tries to log in, the web page either freezes or loads so slowly that it is impossible to use. The problems differ depending on the browser; Firefox gets a blank screen and the loading symbol appears although it is obvious that the page is not loading but has crashed. With Internet Explorer it says that the page can not be displayed but can not identify the reason.