I have a gmail account but don't use it and no one has the address. I go in every once in a while just to check and clear stuff out of the junk folder. Haven't been in before Christmas and I have an email from google showing me people on google I may know and I do know them but like you use another address for all these people. Also I have a ton of newsletters from a crochet site that I just realized I was not getting in my main address on aol anymore and all of a sudden I see all the news letters I have been missing showing up at the gmail address and I never once changed that I wanted the news letters to go to gmail so something must be going on with gmail because I don't give that address out so how this news letter suddenly changed over I have no clue. They started coming into gmail beginning of January. Mary

I don't know anything about G Mail. However, at Hotmail you can configure up to five accounts together. All a user has to do is establish them independently and link them. There after you just log onto anyone of the accounts and use a drop down menu to move about the others. You can gain entry via any of the accounts. I do it most every day. DA

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.

You absolutely can do it and it is very simple it will not affect your other email at all you will just have to sign in to each one on their respective pages to access the email on that account. So go ahead and give it a try, you can use gmail, hotmail, yahoo, or any of the other free webmail. It is best if you do not import your contacts into that email account especially if you are going to use it for facebook so that it can not have access to all of your contacts to send out invites to. My advice is to find out all the settings for creating a good secure private facebook account and keep it updated so that you have no surprises. Things change frequently on facebook! Here you can find lots of good info on that subject. how to setup a secure facebook account - Google Search edit to say It is not a good idea to use the same user name and password for this new email account, you want it to have no connections to your others and be sure you use a good secure password that is not composed of real words but of random letters and numbers, possibly initials and birth dates or partial address numbers. Password Generator & Checker : How Secure is my Password This post was edited by ravencajun on Mon, Jul 8, 13 at 18:20