If you don’t already have an account, you will find it useful to set up an e-mail account whilst you are looking for a new job as it offers you the opportunity to send and receive messages from recruiters, network contacts, companies and other people you will be dealing with.

The best thing with web based e-mail is that you can access it from anywhere, be it an Internet cafe or your own PC.

There are a number of free e-mail services available via the internet. They are free because they are supported by advertising. This type of e-mail account is independent from that provided by an Internet Service Provider (ISP) which is often only accessible via a PC with the ISP’s software installed.

You can write, send or receive e-mail’s from any PC around the world as long as it has an Internet connection . As your mail account is held on an internet server rather than the hard disk on your computer. Mail services are ‘cross-platform’ which means that you can use a PC or MAC to reach your e-mail.

Many of the free services offer the same level of functionality as subscription services and features may include: spell checking, address books, mail forwarding, ability to send and receive file attachments, e-mail address for life, news services and junk or spam mail blocking.

Some services also offer the facility for you to direct other e-mail accounts such as your corporate e-mail to your Internet based account so that if you are traveling you can collect your messages without having to dial into your corporate server.

A selection of the major providers are listed below and all operate in a very similar way. To get started: log onto the web site and choose ‘sign up’ or ‘register’ – you will be asked to enter a user ID and password and you’re in!

www.gmail.com
Googles free email service and in this web masters opinion probably the best. Although Gmail has millions of users it’s still relatively new by online email standards so you’ll have a better chance of getting the email address that you want.

www.hotmail.com
Microsoft’s free e-mail service – not surprisingly the most heavily subscribed e-mail service around. The high number of users results in many duplicate names and so it can be difficult to register simply your name as a unique user name.

www.yahoo.com
Popular mail package with option to purchase additional storage space plus Yahoo Briefcase – a file storage facility – useful if you are moving around and don’t have a laptop. Store your documents in the briefcase and access from any Internet connected computer.

Related posts:

1. How to prepare your CV for the Internet
2. Top 7 Resume Mistakes to Avoid For College Graduates
3. Applying for a Job – Back to basics

I’ll write this article from the perspective of an internet noob so if your already pretty confident using the World Wide Web (yup, thats where the WWW part comes from) then you can move on to one of the other articles within our site.

If you know the name of the web site in question (e.g. www.work-jobs-employment.com) then you can type this into your browser window to be taken there. If you don’t know the name of the web site then you need to take advantage of a clever online device called a search engine.

Search engines trawl the web like fishing boats collecting information on the content of the web sites that they come across. This information is then indexed so that when you search for a specific topic or topics, the search engine will look at its index to see if the words you types match words listed in its index.

If they do then the search engine will generate a list of the web sites that matched your search criteria.

One of the best search engines is Google.com. Google currently trawls billions of web sites every month. In fact currently its supposed to trawl ever web site, every month. This means that any results you find on Google will be pretty up to date.

You can be more specific about the results you find by enclosing them in speech marks. For example if you types in:

CV advice job seeker interview

Then the web site would bring up any site that had any of the words in them. However. If you were to type:

“CV advice job seeker interview” then the search engines would only submit web sites to you that had every word inside the speech marks listed.

This means that the web sites that you are presented with are more likely to be what you are looking for instead of a news web site that had an interview with a guy who wrestled a cat out of a tree

Related posts:

1. Best Strategy Using Internet Job Search Engines
2. A Guide to Keeping Your Hopes Up During a Long Job Search
3. How to prepare your CV for the Internet