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Mobile mailbox

Web accounts let you access your e-mail anywhere, for free

By Eric Griffith

You should try Web mail if you travel, want more than just a work e-mail address or don't have your own computer.

Consider the case of Jack X. Jack has an e-mail account at work, but he doesn't want to use it to receive personal messages. He has an e-mail account through his Internet service provider at home, but he doesn't want to access that at work.

Or consider the case of Jill Z. Jill travels often, doesn't have an ISP mail account but wants to be able to receive and check personal messages from the road.

No problem. All Jack or Jill needs is a Web-based e-mail account—Web mail—and a computer or device that's connected to the Web. As millions of Web mail users know, going to a Web page to check your messages means you can get mail from virtually anywhere: home, office, cybercafe, hotel—any place that offers a Net connection. Another benefit: If you change ISPs, your Web mail address stays the same because it's not tied to your ISP's mail system.

Besides nearly universal accessibility, the best thing about Web mail accounts is that they're available at dozens of sites for free. The only costs are the few minutes it takes to sign up and a willingness to have ads pop up on the screen when you read messages. (In most cases, online ads subsidize the cost of the service.)

Web mail is easy to use. All Web mail sites have a basic, intuitive interface. Just go to the service's homepage, enter your user name and password and open your inbox. You click the link in your inbox to open a message; to write a message, you click Compose or Write and fill in a Web form; then click the Send button and off the message goes.

Web mail messages are stored on servers you access with a password, not on your computer. This might make you nervous if you have sensitive missives waiting for you. After all, some of the biggest names in Web mail, such as Microsoft's Hotmail, have had serious problems as a result of hackers cracking and exposing the weaknesses of their security systems.

But as long as you keep your password to yourself and remember to sign out after every session (especially when you're not on your home computer), using a Web mailbox is generally more secure than storing messages on your personal hard drive, which is where your ISP leaves your mail.

With so many Web mail services available—you can find many of them listed at the Free Email Address Directory—how do you choose? We looked at the three main kinds of free Web mail—basic, portal-based and unified messaging services—and highlighted the most useful features of the best in each category. You may want to try them all. They're free!

Basic Web mail

Perhaps the best example of free Web mail is also one of the oldest and most popular services: Microsoft's Hotmail. Signing up is easy, and the Frequently Asked Questions file at the site is a good way to learn the system's features and policies.

Like most Web mail, Hotmail lets you keep an address book and create folders for storing messages. Hotmail can check up to four work or ISP-based mail accounts, which are also called POP accounts (see "Hop on POP3" on page 12). Whether you can check e-mail sent to your work account depends on how your company has its mail server configured.

The big difference between Web mail systems is in the extras. Hotmail's extras include a reminder service so you won't miss important dates; links to the photo gallery and chat functions of MSN (Microsoft's Internet service); and the ability to search your messages.

Hotmail now has virus scanning to check attachments on incoming messages, though this is no guarantee against infection. As in the case of the notorious Love Bug virus, attachments can be used to infect your computer. Hotmail also provides ways to filter out spam and other unwanted messages.

Infrequent e-mailers take note: You must sign in every two months or your Hotmail account goes inactive.

Most basic Web-mailers like Net(a)ddress and MailCity are free, but they offer few frills.

Your portal mailbox

If you usually start your surfing at one of the big portals such as Excite and Yahoo!, it makes sense to set up your mail account there. If you want to tie your e-mail into a membership at a portal that also provides an address book, news reports, a calendar, a to-do list and much more, then check out Yahoo! Mail. It integrates all of these services the best.

You can link into Yahoo! Mail from a variety of areas, including the homepage and your personalized My Yahoo! page. Or, you can access e-mail with the Yahoo! Messenger software for talking to online buddies.

Signing up is easy, and to be secure, Yahoo! makes you enter your password every time you log in. You can check your POP3 mail account; make filters so incoming mail is tucked into folders you create (even to your pager or cell phone if you prefer); and use POP forwarding to send incoming messages to another e-mail address. This means you could give the entire world your Yahoo address, such as your name(a)yahoo.com, but still check it at work using a program such as Microsoft Outlook, Eudora or Netscape Messenger.

The downside is all your messages bear a small line of Yahoo!-promoting text. Plus, to use POP forwarding, you have to sign up for Yahoo! Delivers, a service that sends you promotional offers. These are minor annoyances, however, when you consider the advantages of a free, sophis-ticated e-mail system.

Keeping it all together

E-mail is just one aspect of unified messaging, a service that combines different kinds of messages, from e-mail to voice mail to faxes and more. UM services make it convenient to get messages in different forms, such as checking your e-mail on the phone, getting faxes in e-mail, listening to voice mail on your computer or other combinations. Some even have specialty options, like a speech-to-text function so you can dictate a message over the phone to send via e-mail. Best of all, most UM services continue to share one aspect with Web mail: They are free.

Onebox.com is an excellent example of a UM service. It gives you a personalized e-mail address (yourname(a)onebox.com) and your own phone number for voice mail. You can get a local number in 12 states (California, Massachusetts, New York, New Jersey, Washington, Florida, Colorado, Georgia, Illinois, Ohio, Texas and Virginia) and the District of Columbia. Voice-mail messages left at your extension can be played back over the Web as WAV or QuickTime audio files. Faxes can also be sent to this number; they're delivered to your e-mail address, and you then can read them on screen just like e-mail.

If you don't want to access your Onebox for anything but faxes or voice mail and prefer to receive e-mail through another system (like the one at your office), Onebox can forward a message to your e-mail when-ever a fax or voice message is waiting to be checked.

Through the phone, you can listen to messages and e-mails thanks to text-to-speech software. From the phone, you can also send a voice message to someone in your Onebox address book via e-mail. You can do these things with your computer, too, if it's equipped with speakers and a microphone.

Onebox also offers a calendar for scheduling and some e-mail filtering and blocking. All of this is free, but you get just a few megabytes of storage for voice mail and fax attachments. You can pay $4.95 a month to get up to 25MB. Other UM services offer similar deals.

If you receive a variety of message types, you should sign up for a UM service. You'll be able to check those messages from just about anywhere, and sometimes with that ubiquitous analog device: the phone.

Handling the mail

Internet research firm Jupiter Communications says that in five years, the average individual will receive annually more than 1,600 commercial and nearly 4,000 personal e-mails. Messaging has become a way of life for Net users, whether it's for sharing photos, catching up with friends or scheduling business meetings.

No matter what your e-mail requirements, you can find a free Web mail service that delivers what you need, and offers more than your ISP's mail service. You may have to look at some ads, but that's a small price to pay. Free Web mail providers ask for personal information when you sign up for an account, so be sure to check a service's privacy policy before deciding which one to choose.

Other drawbacks include speed, especially when downloading or uploading attachments; security issues that you can't do much to control; storage limits (most Web mail providers allow 5MB of message storage); and message filtering that's much less stringent than what you'd have with a POP3 account.

Despite those issues, being able to access your e-mail from anywhere is a real bonus. Being able to do so for free is one of the best deals you'll find anywhere on the Web.