Free Email

Making an appointment with the House representative of your district is never easy. Your congressman, after all, is a very busy man. Because your chances of landing a personal appointment are slim to none, you have to find an alternative way of conveying your messages to your congressman. One effective way of establishing communication with your representative is by sending a message to his or her email account.

The House of Representatives has launched a new email service that allows the citizens of the United States of America to forward their inquiries, concerns, suggestions, praises, or criticisms to their respective congressmen online. It’s called Write Your Representative.

Sending important emails

The first step in sending an email to your state representative is to click the Write Your Representative link on the upper right part of the House of Representatives homepage. On the Writer Your Representative webpage, which was directed from the eponymous link on the homepage, you are required to do three things: select your state from the pull-down menu, enter your zip code and 4-digit zip code extension on the blank field, and verify your information on the Contact My Representative button. If the details you specified are accurate, you will be directed to the contact information page of the congressman in your district.

The contact information page of your congressman also features a “Send a Message to (Name of Congressman)” link that directs you to the official website of your congressman upon clicking. The direct link to the Email-Your-Congressman page where you can enter your personal information and your important message to the congressman is usually found on the Contact Information page of the Congressman’s official website.

Move over, Mr. Weatherman!

Thanks to the advancement in technology, you can now receive weather advisories without tuning in for the weather report in your local news program. In fact, you can now determine whether it is rainy in Chicago or sunny in Philadelphia by simply checking your inbox! To do this, you have to subscribe to AccuWeather, a free email alert service that provides you with accurate weather forecasts and advisories by sending them directly to the inbox in your specified email account.

* Modifying your email address

The most important information that you have to provide when you sign up for AccuWeather is, of course, your email address. After all, the latest weather advisories in your area will all be forwarded to you via email. If you want AccuWeather to send weather alerts to a new email address, just click on the Change My Email Options link on the upper right part of the AccuWeather homepage. The link will then redirect you to Change My Email Options page where you can modify your AccuWeather account according to your personal preferences.

* Changing your forecast location

When you sign-up for AccuWeather alerts, you are required to specify your forecast location. But if you wish to receive email alerts for a different forecast location, you can always change your forecast location settings in the Change My Email Options page in the AccuWeather website.

* Managing your AccuWeather alerts

If you encounter any problems in receiving your AccuWeather email alerts, you should probably try checking the spam folder in your email account. Many built-in email filters misidentify AccuWeather emails as either spam emails or security risks.

Are you looking for a free email service that provides you not only with basic email features, but cute customization options as well? If you are, then you probably should check out IncrediMail, the free advertising-supported email client for Microsoft Windows. Here are some of the cool features of IncrediMail.

* Email notifiers

Do you want to be notified every time you receive an email? If you do, then you will surely love IncrediMail’s collection of animated email notifiers. You can choose from a variety of animated characters that include everything from a fairy and a butler to a penguin and a goldfish.

* Cute emoticons

Like most email services, IncrediMail also has its own collection of emoticons. The thing that separates IncrediMail emoticons from the others, however, is their size. IncrediMail emoticons are almost three times bigger than ordinary emoticons. Now, you can clearly view the emoticons without interchanging the emotional content that they convey.

* Animated images

Emoticons are not the only animated objects that you can add in your IncrediMail messages. In fact, IncrediMail has a huge library of lively animations that you can use to spruce up your emails. Add more life and color to your emails by inserting animated images like a pogo stick-riding hippopotamus or a wave-surfing tiger.

* 3D objects

Another incredible email feature from IncrediMail is the email service’s collection of 3D objects. To add more fun and excitement to your emails, you can customize them into cute 3D objects like flying helicopters, sailing boats, or twisting Rubik’s cubes. You can add the 3D effects to your messages every time you send, receive, or even delete them.

The incoming freshmen enrolled at Boston College will not receive the same email services as the older students did. The officials of the college have decided to stop giving out new email accounts to all incoming students.

Incorporating email addresses to existing accounts

Instead of providing new email accounts with logins and inboxes, the officials at Boston College will only provide the incoming freshmen class of 2009 with a new email address. The new email address, which is in the namesurname@bc.edu format, will be incorporated with the students’ pre-existing email accounts. The college-issued emails, therefore, will be directly forwarded to the personal email accounts that the students specified in their college application forms. So, whether they are using Gmail or Yahoo! Mail or any other email service, the incoming freshmen students of Boston College can expect all their school-related emails in their own inboxes.

Establishing digital identities before entering college

The reason for the college officials’ decision to stop giving out new email accounts to incoming freshmen is the fact that many students have already established their own digital identities before enrolling for college. Many students today, after all, have been email experts since their elementary days. What’s the point in providing them with yet another email account to manage? Besides, it’s not like the students are actually using their Boston College email account for anything other than reading email alerts from the school.

According to Mary Corcoran, the associate vice president for user and support services at Boston College, students also have the tendency to use their Boston College email accounts only because they are required to. “Students weren’t really using the Boston College accounts as much as we would like them to,” she said.

Viewing a variety of attachment types is now easier, thanks to Gmail’s feature that lets you view a variety of file types through its HTML attachment viewer. Whether it’s a slide presentation or a spreadsheet, you can quickly view the file through the HTML attachment viewer. And you won’t have to download a special software just to view the file. Simply click on the option that allows you to view the attachment just like a web page and you’re good to go.

The software behind Gmail can turn many file formats into HTML pages that can be quickly accessed and read just like a web page. Here’s a list of some of the file attachment types that can be displayed as a web page through Gmail:

StarWriter documents (.sdw)
Adobe PDF (Portable Document Format) documents (.pdf)
Microsoft Excel spread sheets (.xls)
OpenOffice 1 / StarOffice 6/7 documents (.sxw)
StarCalc spread sheets (.sdc)
OpenOffice 1 / StarOffice 6/7 presentations (.sxi)
StarImpress presentation (.sdd)
Microsoft PowerPoint presentations (.ppt)
Microsoft Word documents (.doc)
OpenOffice 1 / StarOffice 6/7 spread sheets (.sxc)

Powerpoint presentations as slideshows

Another slick feature of Gmail is that you can actually view PowerPoint presentations as slideshows without having to download any software program. You actually don’t have to leave your web browser if you wish to view your PowerPoint files. The “view as slideshow” option is found at the bottom of the message. Once you click on this option, the file will open on a new browser window. Navigating through the slides is easy; just click on the arrows found on the top part of the screen.