EXCEEDING EMAIL STORAGE LIMITS

Good tip, GMail is great, and there are other advantages also. Total storage capacity of nearly 8Gb, folders, and advanced search when looking for the that email that "uncle John" sent you 2 years ago.

Now, one correction to your above advice "Also while at home forward your incoming gmail emails to your normal account". Care! you need to cancel forwarding from your Bigpond account when you do this, otherwise Bigpond forwards to Gmail, Gmail forwards to Bigpond, Bigpond forwards to GMail..... and things get a bit confusing.

Now I presume you are recommending this approach because you prefer to use Outlook or some othe mail client when at home. Better is to set up your mail client to collect from GMail (use iMap settings). Leave all mail permanently forwarding to GMail, and when at home use Outlook as per normal, when away use browser-based access to GMail. There is no need to change settings when you go travelling or return home.

Also, if you are an Outlook fan (eg you may prefer to use this to manage your address book), you can export a copy of your address book accross to GMail, so it is then available when using web access.

If you setup your GMail iMap settings correctly, mail will also synchronise, so if you delete mail when using a web browser, it will also delete from your Outlook access and you don;t have the problem of managing duplicates.

You can also use a smart phone (eg Palm or other WIndows CE phone) to access email, using GMail as your main iMap account.

GMail will retain copies of sent and deleted emails in the appropriate folder irrespective of whether you access from web, Outlook, or a mobile phone.

Another good use for Gmail is for backup. If you have a document or file or spreadsheet you don't want to lose, just email it to your Gmail address. Let Google look after it for you!

I also bought an Outlook add-in called Always Bcc from Sperry Software.

Whenever I send an email from Outlook, it automatically sends a Bcc (Blind carbon copy) to my Gmail address. That way I have a pemanenbt record of all sent and received emails at Gmail and it's much easier to search there to find something and it's not consuming space on my PC!

If you setup GMail with iMap access, set Outlook to send via GMail, and then collect your GMail via Outlook send/receive, GMail stores everything in the sent/deleted folders without you doing anything.

Also, let's say your preferred email address is yourname@xyz.com but your GMail is somethingelse@gmail.com You can configure GMail so that anything you send looks like it came from yourname@xyz.com anyway.

Happy to do that.

Will explain:
* Setting up account
* Mail forwarding to GMail
* Setting GMail to look like yourname@isp.com
* The difference between POP and iMap access
* Setting Outlook to use GMail as the default send service
* Exporting Outlook address book to GMail
* Accessing GMail by either web or smartphone with synchronisation

Might be a few weeks till I get around to it though.

Hi Ern
And others who have contributed.
Thanks Brian for raising the issue of some people being not right up there with computers.I am one of them.I would like some help
Bob