Web based email from Google

How we use and access our email is changing. Before broadband most people used a dial up connection to access the internet. This was charged by the minute, and was relatively expensive. So we connected to the internet, received our emails onto our PC's, then disconnected. We read the emails, composed replies, and then connected again briefly to do another send and receive.

With the introduction of broadband, virtually all businesses, and the majority of domestic PC users now have a permanent internet connection. We now also have internet access on mobile phones as well. This has lead to many people wishing to be able to access their email from anywhere, at any time, on any device with an internet connection, Webmail was born!

Googlemail was created in April 2004, but for the last three years has been under development and testing and only released to test users by invitation. ASL was given Googlemail to test back in August 2005, and for the last fifteen months we have been using Googlemail as our company email system.

So what makes Googlemail different:

• You get more than enough space for all your emails, and Google are continually increasing the storage space. This means you never have to delete emails to free up space, just keep everything. I have nine thousand emails stored in my GoogleMail mailbox, and it's showing only 17 percent full.
• You search using key words to find that email you want, rather than having to file them in folders. Once you have read an email in your inbox just hit the “archive” button and forget about it. You can always find it again using a search, which saves time.
• Googlemail recognizes related messages, and groups them into "conversations", where associated messages are listed one after another.
• GoogleMail contains one of the most accurate Spam filters I have used.
• All incoming and outgoing emails are scanned for viruses, automatically, including attachments.
• You can access your emails from any computer (PC or Mac), mobile phone, or PDA, anywhere in the world, as long as it's connected to the Internet

Googlemail is very different to the other Web based email accounts and it's innovative features make it in our opinion far superior to all it's competitors.

To get your free GoogleMail account just go to http://mail.google.com/mail/ and sign up.

Chris Moody
ASL Computer Services
www.aslcomputerservices.co.uk

Paint.NET image editing software

Paint.NET is free image and photo manipulation software designed to be used on computers that run Windows. It supports layers, unlimited undo, special effects, and a wide variety of useful and powerful tools.

It started development as an undergraduate college senior design project mentored by Microsoft, and is currently being maintained by some of the alumni that originally worked on it. Originally intended as a free replacement for the MS Paint software that comes with Windows, it has grown into a powerful yet simple tool for photo and image editing.

It isn’t a replacement for Photoshop but it has more than enough features for most peoples needs. I particularly like the feature that turns your photographs into an oil painting.

You can download it from the Paint.Net website.