One thing is as Mikie said, you can unblock mail addresses. Another thing is your aversion to allowing them into your email account. I did it a few times because my ATT/Yahoo account couldn't handle the overload of mail I receive, and my mailbox simply broke down several times and had to be rebuilt. While there is a limit, I receive so much at once and constantly that things periodically went wrong. I let them in and they fixed it each time, and I didn't lose any mail in the process. You don't have to give them your password. They can create a temporary password and then you change it back when they are finished. Another thing is a Yahoo notice that was sent to their Plus users. I don't know if this applies to you because I don't know if you are a Plus subscriber and also have no idea if you use a third party email client like Outlook or IncrediMail or if your friends use one. You can decide for yourself if this is helpful to you at all. It really sounds more like the problem is on your friend's end. Ask her if she uses a third party client. *********** "We have important news for Yahoo! Mail Plus subscribers who are currently using our "POP" feature to send messages via external email clients such as Microsoft Outlook, Outlook Express, Thunderbird, Apple Mail, etc. (also called "SMTP access"). If you are accessing your Yahoo! Mail Plus exclusively through our Web interface, this message does not apply to you. Recently, we saw an unexpected increase in traffic through the servers dedicated to sending Yahoo! Mail Plus POP/SMTP messages. As a result, some users have experienced varying delays in the delivery of Yahoo! Mail messages sent via external email clients. We understand that this has been frustrating, and sincerely apologize for the inconvenience. What Has Changed? We have recently installed new servers to improve the performance of Yahoo! Mail Plus SMTP access. We have spent the last several days upgrading our hardware and restructuring the allocation of bandwidth for these servers. We are confident these changes will resolve the recent problems and increase our system's reliability. Because of these improvements, the settings for your outgoing mail server (SMTP) should change. What Do I Need to Do? To ensure that your email client is properly configured to access the new outgoing mail servers (SMTP), please follow these brief steps: Sign in to your Yahoo! Mail Plus account Go to "Mail Options" --> "POP access" --> "View POP settings" Review the updated settings in "POP Access Settings" If needed, set your email client to the new server: plus.smtp.mail.yahoo.com Or follow these detailed instructions to update your Mail Plus SMTP settings: http://help.yahoo.com/l/us/yahoo/mail/yahoomail/mailplus/pop/pop-35.html Please check the Yahoo! Mail Blog for frequent updates on this and many other Yahoo! Mail topics. We deeply value and appreciate your continued business. Thank you, John Kremer Vice President, Yahoo! Mail"

I have always had problems with Freecycle, I suspect the problem is actually with the Freecycle you are trying to sign up with. I suggest you try another Freecycle or two to see if you can get signed up OK. Besides the one 'local' one, I signed up with 3 or 4 others that are in the area (small towns) about 30-60 minutes away. Once you get signed up, you can get 'every' post emailed to you, or a daily digest of posts, or nothing at all. I just set my local one to send me a daily digest of the posts and opted to get nothing via email from the others. Sue

Jane - good question. I know I can use AOL free mail. It seems to me that this summer/early fall, I kept finding issues with AOL email - and several web-savvy people (like my web designer, etc. suggested that AOL is very troublesome in it's efforts to be helpful. Now I'm having trouble remembering why I was getting so frustrated with AOL. This is what I do recall. Not always being able to view embedded images (including an email blast from a non-profit I'm on the Board of). Difficulty formatting emails - if I cut and paste word documents in the email, it gets deliverd with all kinds of extraneous punctuation and symbols. I've had neighborhood listservs reject some of my postings bc. AOL sent so much gibberish with it. I had to rewrite it to get it sent to these neighborhood yahoo-group listservs in a format that was clear. I think (I could remember this wrong), that if I use AOL's fonts, colors, formatting - it may not get delivered that way. Now I'm opening AOL mail through the firefox browser and not using AOL software. I have found that the search function is vastly inferior to the search function if I opened AOl software. Having AOL email open in Firefox, the searching for emails is highly inaccurate - to the point of being almost useless. This is probably the single biggest frustration I have with AOL (now that I"m not using their software). I don't know that it would work any better if I used the free AIM instead of opening my AOL mail in Firefox. Not quite sure if and how AIM is different. Using AOL mail via Firefox - it just handles my emails badly. It will place emails in my old folder when I've marked them as save as new. I seem to have less control over where I save my emails. It seems to almost randomly decide whether it keeps the email in the new inbox - or places it in the old folder (where it eventually disappears). And I can only access old emails for a short period before they're deleted. And the recently deleted seem available for a tiny, tiny time compared with the AOL software. Jane - if your experience with AOL mail is different, please let me know. I know that it's just been very cumbersome and un-useful since I switched to Firefox this summer. Another problem -which may not be AOL, but could be firefox - or who knows what else. If I'm looking on craigslist and I want to inquire about an item for sale, I can't manage to reply to the poster. I hit the "reply to" button, it places that poster's anonymous contact info in the to: field - but when I hit send, it says that I can't send mail with parenthesis in the BCC field. I have not added anything in the BCC field - and if I click bcc field and delete everything in it, it still insists there are parenthese in the field and won't send the email. Gee - now that I start thinking about it, I guess I can recall all the frustrations I've been having with AOL (not using the AOL software). The reason I haven't cancelled my paid AOL account is bc. I still need to resort to going through AOL software to reliably access and search old emails. I will keep a free AOL account with my current email address - just so I can be reached by anyone I forgot to inform about my new address. And for those who forget and send to the old. I still want to receive those emails. But my hope is to use it less and less often bc. it's troublesome now. A different reason for not using AOL for my professional email is that it just doesn't look professional. (I presume that's one reason your husband using gmail for his professional correspondence - it's just more professional and less amateurish seeming to clients/customers.) not2bright- I appreciate the FWIW addition. It's a little over my head - but not completely. I do have a professional website - which my webdesigner set up to forward my emails to me. I'm not quite ready for setting up my personal email like this, but the more I hang out on this forum, the more I'm willing to attempt things that I once thought were not possible. Lynn.

I've looked and looked and looked for a place to set it to "remember me", but I just cannot find it and I am usually good at this sort of thing. It is seriously so annoying that I may go to the trouble of switching to Gmail. I even tried searching the Yahoo Community for help, but could not come up with anything. Why don't these companies leave well enough alone? Glad to hear I am not the only one in this boat.