.KEYWORD pop
.FLYINGHEAD PRODUCT SHOOT-OUT
.TITLE The quest for free POP3 email for Windows CE that works
.FEATURE
.SPOTLIGHT FIGALT pop-cover.gif
.SUMMARY If you want to use free email, there are a lot of choices out there. Or are there? As Dan Huber learned, there may be lots of services, but very few really worked. He spent days testing services and out of five he tested, one kinda sorta worked, and one worked flawlessly. If you want free POP3 email on your Windows CE device and don’t want to repeat Dan’s hard work, read this article.
.AUTHOR Dan Huber
I wrote this article to serve two purposes: one was to find a compatible and usable free POP3 email service for my own use, and the second was to share my findings with you. When I hear or see the word "free", I think of several things: I pay nothing; limited functionality or use; and unreliability. Though my search wasn’t easy, and was filled with its share of bumps and glitches, I’ve found a solution that works. It took quite a bit of effort, which you won’t have to go through because you’ve got this article.
Just to fill you in on the basics, POP3 is a protocol that is used to transmit and receive email. It requires the use of compatible software and, in the case of Windows CE, that software would be Pocket Outlook’s Inbox.
This simple text-only email software makes use of the POP3 protocol to send and receive mail between users and I have found that it’s much more convenient than using those Web-based free email services such as HotMail and Yahoo! Mail. The topic of a free POP3 email service has come up every now and then on the Windows CE Talk List, a free (there’s that word again!) mailing list devoted to the discussion of Windows CE-related topics.
.CALLOUT Out of all the services, I recommend SoftHome. It hits the nail on the head with the faster session time and it’s a competent service that stands on its own feet without help from another service. I was impressed and would recommend it to anyone in need of free POP3 mail.
I’ve also seen interests expressed in a Windows CE version of Juno but unfortunately, this is not available currently. In my attempt to uncover a good free POP3 email service, I found one that worked flawlessly with my Philips Velo 500. You are welcome to try the other services that I include in this review but beware: I tried them without success.
.H1 Planetary Motion’s CoolMail
The first service I came upon was CoolMail, a service of Planetary Motion. It looked to be the ultimate solution for all things mobile. It offered free Web-based, phone-based, and POP3/IMAP mail access with an address of "something\@coolmail.net," online PIM (personal information manager), and plenty of links to travel, weather, and map sites. For this article, I was primarily interested in POP3 mail access as I feel that it’s still the fastest and easiest way to retrieve email. So, I began by signing up.
Planetary Motion offers two versions of their CoolMail service: Bronze and Silver. Bronze is the service that requires no monthly payment, whereas Silver costs $2.95 each month. You also have the option to upgrade your existing Bronze account to Silver. You are then presented with a page to input your demographic information but upon trying to sign up for the service on my Velo 500 using Pocket Internet Explorer, the "I Accept" button was not functional. Instead, it appeared as a text box with the characters "I Accept –>" inside the box and tapping on this box brought up an editing mode, which is evident in Figure A.
.FIGPAIR A This was a strange Pocket IE behavior.
It might be possible that a Windows CE H/PC Pro device, equipped with Pocket Internet Explorer 3.0, might be capable of completing this operation but I was not able to test that option. So, I had to use my desktop PC equipped with Microsoft’s Internet Explorer 5.0 to fill in this form. That process completed without incident.
Another "feature" that I knew would take some time to grow accustomed to would be the use of numeric digits to login, rather than text. I generally don’t like numbers for login information, so I wasn’t too fond of this.
When I began to navigate around the Member Page for information about configuring my email client to access their POP3 servers, I became aware of a few things. As seen in Figure B, when using Internet Explorer on my desktop machine, I didn’t like how the page looked. It was pretty crowded and busy.
.FIGPAIR B I didn’t like their crowded and busy member page, even when viewed on a desktop machine.
The page layout was also not visually appealing to me while using Pocket Internet Explorer on my Velo, shown in Figure C. In fact, oddly enough, I found that the appearance of the service’s pages and the use of numbers for login information closely resembled the approach of Mirabilis’ ICQ.
.FIGPAIR C Those small icons and bunched text reminded me of Mirabilis’ ICQ page.
Also, the information contained within the pages, to get acquainted with CoolMail’s service, could lead you to believe that POP3 access is their primary method of providing you with email. However, the information that I found was very lacking and I was not sure as to whether or not I needed to use my member ID or my email name. I also learned that they did not provide an SMTP server for you to use with Bronze service and that only Silver accounts included this. In any case, I used my ISP’s SMTP server and I also tried both my email name and member ID in Pocket Outlook’s Inbox service configuration window as you can see in Figure D.
.FIGPAIR D Here’s one attempt at configuring Inbox to work with CoolMail.
Neither configuration worked and I was repeatedly prompted with the error dialog that you see in Figure E.
.FIGPAIR E This dialog box became a common occurrence throughout my search for a solution.
I was a bit discouraged, despite my other gripes with this service so far, because I was sort of anxious to personally try the phone-based services — out of curiosity. But, I had four other services to try so I moved on to the next one.
.H1 NetTaxi
NetTaxi is actually a whole collection of online services that also come in packages. We are only interested in the free services for now, so this is what we’ll continue on to evaluate. A NetTaxi free account includes a personal Web site with ten megabytes of space (that space is shared between your Web site and your email account) and your address would read "www.NetTaxi.com/citizens/userid" so don’t hope for your own domain name for free.
.CALLOUT Sign up for this service at your own risk.
You also receive one free email account at "something\@NetTaxi.com," discounts on NetTaxi purchases, and chat room and message board accessibility. Overall, this sounded like a nice offer. I was still browsing using my desktop at this point and attempted to sign up for a free account. After entering the required information, I received a cryptic error page after submitting as you can see in Figure F.
.FIGPAIR F I’m not an HTML wizard, so you try to figure this one out.
I went back to that page, retyped my information, and pressed the Submit button — again with no change. I made an attempt to sign on using my Velo 500 and ran into the same trouble. I tried for several days without success and deemed this service unreliable. Sign up for this service at your own risk. For such an important function to be out of operation didn’t look promising to me, so use your own judgement when considering this service.
.H1 TeleBot
TeleBot is a somewhat similar service to CoolMail though the visual styling of this service looked much more impressive, as is presented in Figure G.
.FIGPAIR G A pretty home page doesn’t necessarily mean pretty service.
After my previous experiences, I was having a bit of doubt at this point, so I proceeded with caution and with a heavy heart – would I have anything positive to review? TeleBot features a nice variety of options but as I stated previously, I wasn’t really interested in testing these features — but I’ll make mention of them:
.BEGIN_LIST
.BULLET Free voicemail with a toll-free number for people to access is provided. The sound clip (limited to one minute) is then saved and sent as a .WAV file to your email account, which fortunately a Windows CE device is capable of playing.
.END_LIST
.BEGIN_LIST
.BULLET Their Web site also mentioned the upcoming release of international toll-free voicemail numbers.
.END_LIST
.BEGIN_LIST
.BULLET You are also given free FAX receiving capabilities via your personal extension at a toll number and can receive up to 25 pages a day, which are sent to your email account as a .TIF image file.
.END_LIST
.BEGIN_LIST
.BULLET You can also send one-page faxes to anyone within the U.S. for free.
.END_LIST
.BEGIN_LIST
.BULLET You are given free paging notification of any new messages through your PCS/GSM phone, pager, or another email account.
.END_LIST
You can also listen to your email and voicemail for free, if you live in the 408 California area, otherwise you’ll pay the toll call. This is the same situation for users who want to fax you as they’ll be sending a fax to a 408 phone number. It was noted that the phone-based email and voicemail service wouldn’t be available until July 30th, 1999, however.
And finally, you receive a free Web-based/POP3 accessible email account with some limitations. You have ten megabytes of storage and can send up to sixty messages an hour. You are also limited to sending mail to fifty users per message, most likely an antispam feature in disguise. Your messages will contain advertising inline somewhere.
Now, let’s try out that POP3 mail account!
Fortunately, you are provided with an SMTP server address to use, but more on this later. All went well at the signup page and I was pleased with how smooth everything went, so far. When I began to connect for the first time after configuring Pocket Outlook’s Inbox to use TeleBot, I received the error you see in Figure H.
.FIGPAIR H This appeared to be a somewhat common dialog box with a known fix.
I tried placing a pair of brackets (i.e., "<> ") around the destination email address I was trying, as this is commonly the solution to this error. But, to my despair, it didn’t help. I tried repeatedly to send the message but it failed each time with the same error.
So, I gave up hope for their SMTP server, but not their POP3 server. For now, one was finally working. I used my own ISP’s SMTP server instead and after twenty-seven nervous seconds, my message went through! So, I’ve come to conclude that this service will work if you use another SMTP server.
This service initially appeared to go so smoothly that I was disappointed at the overall outcome but, since I had two more chances to try, I continued on.
.H1 Populus Mail
This service takes a different approach than the rest so far. It is email and email only, as you can read at the top of Figure I, a shot of Populus’ signup page.
.FIGPAIR I Populus is up-front and honest that they only offer email.
Also, they do provide forwarding service, but their main priority is POP3 access. Their web site stressed the importance of POP3 access because of the limited time needed to connect to do your work and I very much agree.
As for the features of your Populus Mail account, you are limited to messages of five hundred kilobytes in size — so this may be a bit tight if you like to send large files back and forth with your CE device. You are again limited to sending one message to fifty recipients at a time, as well as the number of daily messages. They make claims that the limit is high enough for most users and it should not be a problem. So, how do they expect to cover the costs of you using their service?
They’ve come up with a system in which they first acquire your basic information and then you take a small survey following that first page. This provides them with your interests so that they send you appropriate advertisements, though they claim that these messages are only from legitimate companies. You can even block certain types of advertisements. This sounded reasonable enough for a free service so I decided to continue on.
I grew a bit anxious as the questions continued on about all sorts of information about me and was pleased when it finally ended. I then received an email at my existing address about how to configure my system to collect and send POP3 mail and quickly entered the corresponding information into my Velo 500. I connected to the Internet and began logging into my account and saw that I had reached another annoying error message.
There was no way of toggling settings to get around this so I decided to move on in frustration. Four down and one to go.
.H1 SoftHome
SoftHome has a variety of services, from domain hosting to server hosting. Somewhere in the mix is free email. Their Web site doesn’t have much to it, in regards to email, as you can see in Figure J, so signup was quick.
.FIGPAIR J This is a somewhat barren page but don’t judge a book by its cover.
I was using my desktop again at the time so I won’t have any Windows CE screenshots for this service.
I found no details available in regards to what features or functionality the mail access had, such as the number of possible message transmissions per day, file size limitations, etc. The only feature that I did find mentioned was the fact that they have their own POP3 and SMTP servers, so there’s no need to obtain the use of a third party SMTP server.
After observing the introductory page, the only choice was to pick a personal or commercial email address, with the personal account available at no cost and the commercial account coming at cost (I couldn’t find a cost on their Web site though).
After I chose a personal account and entered all of the required information, I was given the information on configuring my software to operate with their service. The instructions were very concise, but I didn’t find them lacking at all. I entered the information that I found on the final page into my Velo 500 and set it up to connect to the Internet.
I composed an offline test message to myself (not using the new address, however) and placed it in the Outbox. I connected to the service. I began to time the session of logging on and sending a simple three-line message. Nineteen seconds was the time. Not only did it go through, it was faster than TeleBot by eight seconds! Success! I found an account that worked flawlessly and was faster yet! I was ecstatic. I didn’t need to place a pair of brackets around my recipient’s address to get it to go through, either. Utter bliss!
.BEGIN_KEEP
.H1 Wrap up
I must say that this was one bumpy road I hope I don’t have to travel again. Between switching off my desktop’s modem and my Velo’s modem, and syncing status reports back and forth (using the fine HPC Notes, I might add!) to keep myself organized, it was a lot of trouble to just find a compatible free email account. Aren’t the free things in life supposed to come easily?
In any case, I hope this has proven helpful. Out of all the services, I recommend SoftHome. It hits the nail on the head with the faster session time and it’s a competent service that stands on its own feet without help from another service. I was impressed and would recommend it to anyone in need of free POP3 email. TeleBot has a lot more to offer and is a worthy choice as long as another SMTP server is accessible to you. Good luck and happy emailing.
.BEGIN_SIDEBAR
.H1 Product availability and resources
CoolMail is available at https://www.planetarymotion.com/default.asp.
Telebot is available at http://www.telebot.net.
NetTaxi is available at http://www.NetTaxi.com.
Populus is available at http://www.pplmail.com.
SoftHome is available at http://www.softhome.net/services/email.shtml.
More services are available a http://www.emailaddresses.com.
.END_SIDEBAR
.BIO Dan Huber is a high school sophomore at Palmerton Area High School. He can be reached at wince@bigfoot.com.
.END_KEEP
