Being Webmaster of my church provides for some different tasks. Among them is acting as a postmaster for any mail sent to the general email address. I had automatically been forwarding all email sent to this general email address to a Hotmail account. Many many times I’ve found that Hotmail is slow and cumbersome. That’s usually what happens with Microsoft. They usually buy some new product and make it bloatware. I have no patience when I’m trying to send an email and I keep getting “server busy” errors. You get what you pay for I guess.
So I made the switch to a Yahoo mail account. We’ll see how this one does. I would have switched to Gmail (I have an account with 6 available invites) but I wasn’t sure if there was any virus checking with Gmail. Being the receipent of viruses is a risk of being a webmaster for the church. I wouldn’t dare download the church’s email using Outlook. There are just too many well-meaning people out there who send out viruses without knowing it. I’ve never had a problem with Hotmail’s virus checker and I probably won’t have a problem with Yahoo’s virus checker either.
Postscript (3/1/05)
After one day from the switchover, I’ve found Yahoo is much faster than Hotmail. However there were some bugs in the system. I had to put some spam filters in place so that I wouldn’t get overloaded with Viagra spam and other such nonsense. It is truly amazing how many people will scrape whois entries looking for email addresses so they can sell you some snake oil.