E-mail for travellers

Citation

Andrew, A.M. (2000), "E-mail for travellers", Kybernetes, Vol. 29 No. 9/10. https://doi.org/10.1108/k.2000.06729iag.005

E-mail for travellers

E-mail for travellers

In a recent Commentary, the e-mail management facilities offered by Mail.com, Inc. were mentioned. These allow the downloading of mail into any of a number of folders, any where there is full Internet access such that the site: http://www.mail.com/mailcom can be opened. This is a great convenience, but for those of us who leave a lot of messages in folders for future consideration (equivalent to having a cluttered office desk) there is some inconvenience in having the remotely-received messages in mailcom folders, only accessible by opening the Web site, and the home-received ones in folders on the home computer. There is presumably no problem for people who have a dedicated full-time Internet connection, who will probably use the mailcom folders exclusively.

An alternative facility with some correspondence to the mailcom one is now offered by the Freeserve ISP, and can be found at the address: http://www.fsmail.net/ The user is invited to register, and to choose a password, and to acquire yet another e-mail address, of the form: alexandrew@fsmail.net Here again, the mail is downloaded into a folder that is part of the fsmail facility and can only be accessed by opening the Web site.

Interestingly, however, the fsmail Web site also offers the possibility of receiving Freeserve e-mail directly (for users who have a Freeserve e-mail address) using the existing password for that purpose (distinct from the fsmail password). The mail can be transferred to a folder that is part of the remote facility and only accessible by opening the Web site. According to my tests of the scheme, the mail that is received remotely is not deleted from the "home" arrangement for receiving Freeserve mail.

The mailcom facility, on the other hand, gives its users the choice of deciding whether or not mail is deleted from the "home" arrangements when downloaded remotely, and this choice can be reviewed at any time, and need not be the same for all of the mail services accessed. Of course, if the mail is not deleted from the "home" arrangement, my complaint about the inconvenience of having the mail divided between a number of folders loses its force because all the mail will still be there in the "home" inbox. On the other hand, it is tempting, when the possibility is offered, to choose to have items deleted from the "home" inbox when downloaded remotely, since otherwise the separation of the significant messages from the junk has to be done twice over. The seriousness of this clearly depends on the durations of the periods of absence from the home computer.

When I tried it out (in January 2000), the facility for receiving Freeserve mail remotely was described as being a beta version, and comments about its performance were invited by the company called MyNet Ltd responsible for it. I had difficulty in using the facility to download a message with a large attached file, which caused Internet Explorer to exit and to initiate a diagnostic procedure. When I then applied the mailcom facility to the same message it was accepted with no trouble, and the large attachment was readily downloaded to the computer's hard disk. This suggests that the mailcom system is more robust than the other, but a single test should not be taken too seriously, especially since the Freeserve system was at the beta stage of development.