.MAC sanity check

[ebony]

I'm new to the mac world, but after a week of getting up to speed I'm completely converted.

I currently have the 2 month free .mac membership.

Now to keep this it is £69 for the year ! However all I want is the mac.com email address.

My understanding is that I would have to pay the full £69 to keep this, and if I wanted additional .mac email addresses it would be an additional £7.50.

Is there no cheaper option to keep .mac email addresses ?

[stuart07970]

Hmm!

I'm afraid so!

The thing about .mac is that its an entire suite of services.
(e-mail hosting with online access, online data storage, website hosting, pod/photocasting etc)
There are much cheaper or free versions of most of them available separately.
But with .mac its the integration between them that's the key.

I got a cheap .mac account from a seller in the US on eBay for about £40!
(.mac & Applecare are all internationally compatible)

You're new to macs (I only switched 6 months ago). Get it for a year and if your not using all the services, you can cancel it next year. By which time you'll get sucked in and be using all the services.

Extra e-mail accounts I think are more, but each account can have up to 5 alias's.
EG, johnsmith@mac.com would be your e-mail address
(only give this to friends and family)
then set up different alias's for whatever you wish...
eg johnsmithltd@mac.com for work stuff
johnsmithjunk@mac.com for junk etc etc.
. . . and you mail comes in colour coded, and you can use any alias to reply to mail.

Also you get to access your mail 'hotmail' style online from any computer, EVEN A PC !

Cheers

stuart:smashin:

Try it you'll love it.

[ancientgeek]

I have a .mac account, but the prudent thing to do is to use your own domain name (which is very cheap), and then you can be sure it is yours for ever. e.g. get one at ukreg.com. You can divert the emails free to whatever your current email service is, so when you tire of .mac, you can simply switch to another email service without teling anyone; just change the redirection.

gmail is free, and includes free pop access from your mail program.

One of the benefits of a .mac account is that it uses IMAP. What this means is that you keep all your emails on the server, and you can do your email from any computer, work, home, internet cafe or whatever.

[Hitby]

agreed with the above, I use my own domain name for both email and web storage - if you don't want to have web hosting gmail gives you over 2gig of space and you can forward your own email address name@domainname.co.uk for nothing to that. Works for me.

Dan