Today we took the plunge and decided to review an free web based email service submitted to us a while back. Figmedia.com is a free online web mail service that has a whole heap of nifty features! From web disc's to SSL logins, ability to forward to other email addresses, auto responders and more! But let's start at the beginning.

 

We went to www.figmedia.com today to see just how user friendly and feature rich this website really is. First we'll start with the registration process. Simular to what yoou would see from the big email providers like gmail and yahoo mail. They ask you for your email address and actually verify it against their database of users as you type it in. Cool feature! I hate sitting and submitting forms only to be brought back to the same page telling me something is taken or i missed this and that. Anyways you'll see standard fields for your name city address etc. We submit and we are presented with a upgrade option of sorts, for more space and features. I'll decline for now. And poof we're in and setup! Not bad!

 

Couple things i notice is the amount of things you can do here. I see post it notes for reminders, Full Calendar, a space meter of just how much space i got left and of course my email box. So after going through all these features this service really has some great tools and filters for emailing. I setup a few spam filters to see just how sensitive the feature is. I asked the site to spam box anything that says winner, viagra, free, and other keywords i always see in my hotmail box.

 

Now for the test! I send off a couple emails from my hotmail account and behold!Spam is caught and moved to another folder! Wow that's great! There's a cool nifty tool i see for adding contacts, i added each of my friends today and had the website send off a email to each of them to complete their contact details for me. Wow what a typing savior!

 

The sites layout is similar to what you would see with most place, although the space feature is very limiting. 100mb for a free account is a bit small for me, but i'm sure they will increase that over time or i might upgrade to a premium account.

 

Final notes!

 

It's a must try! Go check it out its free and easy to use. There are some great features available!

 

http://www.figmedia.com

 

Overall Score 4.5/5

 

 

NEW YORK (Reuters) - Eminem has come clean, saying that he knew what was in store when bare-buttocked comedian Sacha Baron Cohen crash-landed on him at the MTV Movie Awards television broadcast Sunday.

Eminem stormed out of the awards ceremony after Baron Cohen, in the role of the main character from his new movie, "Bruno," landed on his lap after a flying mishap, leaving the audience wondering if the rapper really was furious or if it was a stunt.

The Detroit rapper told website RapRadar.com that he knew full well what was about to happen and that it was all staged, right down to his disgust when Baron Cohen, clad in white feather wings and a jockstrap, landed face down in his lap, buttocks aloft.

"Sacha called me when we were in Europe and he had an idea to do something outrageous at the Movie Awards. I'm a big fan of his work, so I agreed to get involved with the gag," Eminem told RapRadar on Wednesday.

"I'm thrilled that we pulled this off better than we rehearsed it."

Eminem said he went back to his hotel after storming out of the show and laughed for three hours.

The incident quickly became the most talked-about highlight of a live two-hour television show that pushed the boundaries of taste and language.

Writer Scott Aukerman, who worked with the show's host, Andy Samberg, wrote in a blog posting on Monday that "the Bruno/Eminem incident was staged" but MTV and Baron Cohen have so far declined comment.

Baron Cohen plays a gay Austrian fashionista called Bruno in his new movie, which opens in the United States on July 10.

This is the actor's big-screen follow-up to "Borat: Cultural Learnings of America for Make Benefit Glorious Nation of Kazakhstan," which grossed $261 million globally and triggered a slew of lawsuits from unwitting victims.

Mark Smith
Riyadh, Saudi Arabia — Associated Press, Wednesday, Jun. 03, 2009 01:40PM EDT

President Barack Obama began his latest bid to open a dialogue with the Muslim world Wednesday by seeking the counsel of King Abdullah of Saudi Arabia, home to Islam's two holiest sites in Mecca and Medina.

“The United States and Saudi Arabia have a long history of friendship. We have a strategic relationship,” Mr. Obama said as he visited the monarch's desert horse farm. The U.S. president called King Abdullah wise and gracious, adding: “I am confident that working together that the United States and Saudi Arabia can make progress on a whole host of issues of mutual interest.”

In turn, King Abdullah expressed his “best wishes to the friendly American people who are represented by a distinguished man who deserves to be in this position.”

Earlier, the king greeted Mr. Obama at Riyadh's main airport with a ceremony when the new U.S. president arrived after an overnight flight from Washington. Each country's national anthem was played, the Saudi national guard was on hand and there was a 21-gun salute.

Mr. Obama and King Abdullah then sat together in gilded chairs, sipped cardamom-flavoured Arabic coffee from small cups and chatted briefly in public before retreating to hold private talks on a range of issues.

Around the same time Air Force One touched down in the country, Al-Jazeera Television broadcast a new audio tape from Osama bin Laden in which he threatened Americans and said Mr. Obama inflamed hatred toward the U.S. by ordering Pakistan to crack down on militants in Swat Valley and block Islamic law there.

White House press secretary Robert Gibbs, in Saudi Arabia with Mr. Obama, said al-Qaeda obviously is seeking to shift attention away from what he called the president's historic efforts to have an open dialogue with the Muslim world.

Saudi Arabia is a stopover en route to Cairo, where Mr. Obama is set to deliver a speech that he's been promising since last year's election campaign — aiming to set a new tone in America's often-strained dealings with the world's 1.5 billion Muslims.

With King Abdullah alongside him, Mr. Obama told reporters: “I thought it was very important to come to the place where Islam began and to seek his majesty's counsel and to discuss with him many of the issues that we confront here in the Middle East.”

In a pre-trip interview with the BBC, Mr. Obama set the tone for his swing through the Middle East, saying: “What we want to do is open a dialogue.”

“You know, there are misapprehensions about the West, on the part of the Muslim world. And, obviously, there are some big misapprehensions about the Muslim world when it comes to those of us in the West,” Mr. Obama said.

Many of those Muslims still smoulder over Iraq, Guantanamo Bay and unflinching U.S. support of Israel, but they are hoping the son of a Kenyan Muslim who lived part of his childhood in Indonesia, the world's most populous Muslim country, can help chart a new course.

Aides cautioned that Mr. Obama was not out to break new policy ground in his Cairo speech, which follows visits to Turkey and Iraq in April and a series of outreach efforts including a Persian New Year video and a student town hall meeting in Istanbul. And they said the president is not expecting quick results, even though the speech will be distributed as widely as possible.

“We don't expect that everything will change after one speech,” Mr. Gibbs, the press secretary, said Tuesday. “I think it will take a sustained effort and that's what the president is in for.”

Officials said Mr. Obama also wouldn't flinch from difficult topics, whether it's the Iraq and Afghanistan conflicts, the goal of a Palestinian state or democracy and human rights. Mr. Obama has been criticized for setting the address in Egypt, where President Hosni Mubarak has jailed dissidents and clung to power for nearly three decades.

By Federico Escher And Alan Clendenning, The Associated Press

FERNANDO DE NORONHA, Brazil - Military planes located more debris from an Air France jet on Wednesday as the first navy ship arrived at the scene in the mid-Atlantic. But high seas and heavy winds slowed the recovery effort and delayed the arrival of crucial deep-water submersibles.

Search vessels from several countries pushed toward the floating debris, including a seven-metre chunk of plane and a 20-kilometre-long oil slick that Brazilian pilots spotted from the air. Rescuers have still found no signs of life from the plane that was carrying 228 people from Rio de Janeiro to Paris, air force spokesman Col. Jorge Amaral said.

A Brazilian navy spokeswoman said a patrol boat was close to one debris field after spending two days pushing through rough weather to reach the site, but had not yet retrieved any wreckage.

A navy frigate was expected to arrive later in the day, said the spokeswoman, who spoke on condition of anonymity in keeping with policy.

Flight 447 disappeared minutes after flying into an extremely dangerous band of storms Sunday night, but what exactly caused its electrical systems and cabin pressure to fail remains a mystery. The "black box" cockpit recorders could be kilometres below the surface of the Atlantic Ocean.

If they can't be recovered, investigators will have to focus on maintenance records and a burst of messages sent by the plane just before it disappeared. Officials have released some details of these messages, but a more complete chronology was published Wednesday by Brazil's O Estado de S. Paulo newspaper, citing an unidentified Air France source.

Air France and Brazilian military officials refused to confirm the report. But if accurate, it suggests that Flight 447 may have broken up while in the air as it passed through a violent storm, experts told The Associated Press.

The report said the pilot sent a manual signal at 11 p.m. local time saying he was flying through an area of "CBs" - black, electrically charged cumulo-nimbus clouds that come with violent winds and lightning. Satellite data has shown that towering thunderheads were sending 160 km/h updrafts into the jet's flight path at that time.

Ten minutes later, the plane sent a burst of automatic messages, indicating the autopilot had disengaged, the "fly-by-wire" computer system had been switched to alternative power, and controls needed to keep the plane stable had been damaged. An alarm also sounded, indicating the deterioration of flight systems, according to the report.

Three minutes after that, more automatic messages indicated the failure of two other fundamental systems pilots use to monitor air speed, altitude and direction. Then, a cascade of other electrical failures in systems that control the main flight computer and wing spoilers.

The report repeats a detail previously released by Brazil's Air Force: that the last message came at 11:14 p.m., indicating loss of air pressure and electrical failure. The newspaper said this could mean sudden de-pressurization, or that the plane was already plunging into the ocean.

Air France spokesman Nicolas Petteau referring questions about the report to the French accident investigation agency, BEA, whose spokesman Martine Del Bono said the agency won't comment.

Brazil's Defence Minister Nelson Jobim also declined to comment on the report, saying "that investigation is being done by France, Brazil's only responsibility is to find and pick up the pieces."

France's defence minister and the Pentagon have said there were no signs that terrorism was involved, and Jobim said "that possibility hasn't even been considered."

The fierce thunderstorms, turbulence, lightning or a catastrophic combination of events could have broken apart the plane, aviation experts have said. And while the messages reported by the newspaper don't indicate why the aircraft went down, they strongly suggest it broke apart in the air, said Bill Voss, president and CEO of the Flight Safety Foundation in Alexandria, Va.

"These are telling us the story of the crash. They are not explaining what happened to cause the crash," Voss said. "This is the documentation of the seconds when control was lost and the aircraft started to break up in air."

Voss stressed that the messages alone were not enough to understand why the Air France jet went down, noting that the black boxes will have "far more parameters" that could determine the cause.

The new debris was discovered about 90 kilometres south of where searchers a day earlier found an airplane seat, a fuel slick, an orange buoy and pieces of white debris. The original debris was found roughly 640 kilometres northeast of the Fernando de Noronha islands off Brazil's northern coast, an area where the ocean floor drops as low as 7,000 metres below sea level.

Brazil was leading the search, while France took charge of the crash investigation, working with Air France, Airbus and meteorologists to determine what happened.

Brazilian divers were expected to arrive Thursday, but if the black boxes are at the bottom of the sea, their recovery will have to wait for the arrival early next week of a French research ship with remotely controlled submersibles that can explore as deeply as 6,000 metres.

The sturdy black boxes - voice and data recorders - are built to give off signals for at least 30 days, even underwater, and could keep their contents indefinitely.

But the head of France's accident investigation agency, Paul-Louis Arslanian, said in Paris that he is "not optimistic" about recovering the recorders - and that investigators should be prepared to continue the probe without them.

"It is not only deep, it is also mountainous," he said. "We might find ourselves blocked at some point by the lack of material elements."

A French AWACS radar plane and two other French military planes flew Wednesday over the area where debris was found to better narrow down the search zone. A U.S. navy P-3C Orion surveillance plane - which can fly low over the ocean for 12 hours at a time - also joined the operation.

Arslanian said investigators didn't have enough information to determine whether the plane broke up in the air or upon impact with the sea, and that in the absence of black box data, they are studying maintenance and other records.

"For the moment, there is no sign that would lead us to believe that the aircraft had a problem before it took off," Arslanian said.

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