Bypass puny e-mail storage

Q:Many of my friends and I use Road Runner, which has a paltry 10 MB e-mail storage capacity.

Sometimes friends send one or two Windows Media Player attachments that fill the box. Vacations are a real problem if one cannot access mail daily 1/8. Is there a way to route my mail through Yahoo, which has huge storage, and still use Thunderbird?

M.N.C., Raleigh

A:The 10 MB limit on e-mail storage in Road Runner is indeed small, especially when compared with the generous 1 GB storage offered by Yahoo Mail.

Once you reach the storage limit on your Road Runner account (i.e., before you download the messages to your machine), people who send you e-mail will find their messages bouncing back with a note that your account is "over quota," an unpleasant message to send to friends, family and business associates.

To find a solution to this problem, I had a technical chat online with a Road Runner representative named Steve P. He said you can automatically forward e-mail messages from your Road Runner account to any other e-mail address by logging in to Road Runner Webmail at webmail.nc.rr.com and changing a setting.

After you have entered your user name and password in Webmail, click the Options tab and then click Settings. In the Mail Forwarding box, enter the e-mail address to which you want to forward your messages. Then click the Save Changes button. After you save this change, you will not see your e-mail when you check your Road Runner account; your messages will be forwarded to the other address.

If you decide you no longer want to forward your e-mail -- for example, when you return from vacation -- you can return to Road Runner Webmail, delete the forwarding address from the Mail Forwarding box and save the change.

I highly recommend the live online chat with the Road Runner technical folks. The technician instantly responded to my request for the chat session, and he answered my questions quickly. In addition, I received by e-mail a transcript of the entire chat session for convenient later use.

To try the live online chat, Road Runner customers can go to help.rr.com, enter their information and then, on the Help and Member Services page that opens, choose Live Chat Support.

As for the second part of your plan, you can use Mozilla's Thunderbird e-mail program to read Yahoo e-mail if you're willing to pay a little. To send and receive e-mail messages with a program that supports the POP format -- which Thunderbird, Outlook Express, Netscape Mail, Eudora and others do -- you will have to sign up for Yahoo Mail Plus for $19.95 a year.

Q:Why do I keep getting question marks where I am supposed to get quote marks and apostrophes in e-mail that I receive?

J.D., Raleigh

A:Your e-mail senders are using characters that your e-mail program does not recognize.

For instance, your senders may be copying and pasting formatted text from word-processing files or other types of documents into e-mail messages. Word- processing programs can automatically change single quote marks, double quote marks and apostrophes into "smart quotes." These are curly punctuation marks rather than straight ones, and they are nonstandard characters.

E-mail encoding may prevent your e-mail program from recognizing and displaying nonstandard characters.

You can check your encoding from within your e-mail program. For example, in Thunderbird, click the View menu and select Character Encoding. In Outlook Express, choose the Tools menu, select Options and click the Read tab; click the Fonts button to view encoding.