Opening and using a Web-based e-mail account is free. Once you have it, you can access it from any computer that is on the Internet. There are many sites where you can get one. For now, I'm using Windows Live Hotmail to demonstrate how your home office can benefit from a web-based e-mail account. To summarize, it is a free home office network. I save all my text files as draft e-mails. A free Windows live Hotmail account now has five gigabytes of storage space. I have never come close to needing it all. Right now it is at one percent used. To give you an idea
how convenient this is, let me share just a few of the documents I have saved there. These are in addition to all the e-mails I have saved:
I can log in anywhere and pick up where I left off work. Windows Live Hotmail has a spell checker. It also has these features: font style, font size, bold, italics, underline, left align, centering, right align, insert link, font colors, and emoticons. You might not write articles, but you probably write something. All your business letters, proposals, invoices, or ad copy could be right there at your fingertips, wherever you get online. Not only can you receive e-mail anywhere, you can also have everything you need to answer those e-mails.
Murphy's law says that whenever you really need something, that will be when you can't find it. We often misplace resumes because we don't need them very often. Keeping my resume in my Windows Live Hotmail account helps me remember to update it, too. Resumes should be updated with our accomplishments. Even if you don't need a resume, you probably are asked for references sometimes. We all should check our business references once a year or so to make sure phone numbers and addresses are current. E-mail is a convenient way to do this, and a convenient place to store the results.
I have the confirmation e-mail for every website I ever registered with. I have only used this one e-mail account since March 12, 1997. That saves me lots of the heartache that my friends have had when they couldn't remember which sites they belonged to or how to access them. You are always online when you need this information. Store it online! Of course, use a unique and very secure password for your web based e-mail account. It is your master account, and very privacy sensitive.
I put all my favorite URLs in there by downloading Mozilla Firefox. While you're installing Firefox, there is an option to import your Internet Explorer Favorites. Say yes. Mozilla Firefox saves them in a file that you can open. Its titled Bookmarks. Open it, then copy and paste all the URLs and their descriptions into a draft e-mail. Save it there. I use Firefox exclusively now so that I can update my Windows Live Hotmail Home Page every weekend.
I can access all this from any computer in my house, my office, an Internet cafe, a friend's house, a hotel room,
you name it. Also, I have switched to another ISP twenty times, but I always have the same e-mail address. I have had several computers crash on me. I never worry about recovering the data on them. It is all duplicated on my key chain Flash Drive and in my free Windows Live Hotmail account.