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YOU CAN'T ESCAPE E-MAIL--BUT YOU CAN MANAGE ITElectronic mail has become a lifeline for millions of people, especially for execs. But keeping up with it is a huge -- and time-consuming -- pain in the neck. So what happens if you have more than one critical E-mail account to look at, but only five minutes before you leave for the airport? What if a crucial E-mail message must reach a customer -- but you don't have the time to check on whether it really did? Well, just when you thought you knew everything about E-mail, there's more... Free E-mail seems to be the latest trend on the Web. It's everywhere, on portals such as Yahoo!, on Web sites such as Business Week Online, even from industry behemoths such as Microsoft, which owns MSN Hotmail. Perhaps you just can't resist the temptation, and have signed up for more E-mail accounts than you can monitor. Well, don't think too small: Many of these free services will help you manage your multiple mail accounts and enable you to view your messages from virtually anywhere. MSN Hotmail (www.hotmail.com) is the world's largest free E-mail provider with 25 million current accounts, a number that increases by 125,000 a day. For travelers, one of the biggest benefits of MSN Hotmail is that you can funnel into a single mailbox the E-mail from up to four different post office protocol (POP3) accounts -- and they don't have to be Hotmail accounts. Of course, E-mail is basically E-mail, so why should anyone choose Hotmail? Laura Norman, Product Manager for MSN Hotmail, contends that it differs from other free E-mail services in "scalability -- the ability to offer high performance even though the number of accounts has increased so rapidly." EXPIRATION DATES. For the sake of argument, though, let's say you don't like big. There are plenty of small free E-mail services. While Net@ddress (www.netaddress.com), another free E-mail provider, is like a Web neighborhood (it has only 5 million users), it offers many of the same services as Hotmail. Net@ddress lets you maintain up to seven POP accounts and, like other service providers, automatically filters your messages for unwanted mail detected via subject header or source. One important differentiating feature of Net@ddress is that it enables you to expire pages so they won't be stored in your browser's cache. This security feature can protect your confidential messages from prying eyes when you're on the go and may not be using your own PC to read your mail. O.K., you're saying. I already know about free E-mail, and getting to it from the road. But have you ever found yourself waiting for an important E-mail message without the time or ability to be constantly check your inbox for new messages? MailPush (www.mailpush.com), which is offered by New Email Communication Systems (NECS) Ltd., an Israeli subsidiary of the Bell South International Group, is an offline E-mail notification service that monitors your E-mail accounts and notifies you within seven minutes via fax, phone, cellular, or pager when you've received a new message. MailPush also notifies you in similar fashion when your message has been delivered. MailPush can help eliminate the costly, time-consuming task of calling up your Internet service provider while traveling. Launched in the U.S. last summer, it monitors any of your POP3 mail boxes, although each mailbox is a different MailPush account, and it's expanding to accommodate non-POP3 protocols as well. Although the service is currently being offered for free in the U.S. as a one-month trial to the first 24,000 registrants, each account will run no more than $10 per month once fees are instituted. Question: If I receive 50 messages in my inbox, will I receive 50 calls? Answer: Not unless you choose to. MailPush offers you the ability to set up different profiles to filter your messages. So if you're on the road and just want to be notified of messages from your boss, you can set up your account to do so before you leave. You can also opt to have the entire body of your message(s) faxed to a designated fax machine. All you have to do is call and provide the number of the fax machine at your final destination -- in any of 20 countries -- to have your E-mail waiting when you arrive. CERTIFIED E-MAIL. Have you ever had a message get lost in cyberspace? Even if you haven't, at some point you've probably worried when sending an important message that it won't get through. This concern led the founder and CEO of Certifiedemail.com, Court Coursey, to found the Web version of the Pony Express. Certifiedemail.com assures its customers that their message will reach its recipient -- securely. You can send one certified E-mail for $2, up to 20 for $3.95 per month, and an unlimited number for $6.95 per month. After you compose your message, you send it to Certifiedemail.com's Web site, where it is scanned for viruses, stored, and encrypted. Once recipients are notified via regular E-mail that they have received a certified E-mail message, they use the link within that message to go to the Web site where they follow the prompts to retrieve the actual mail. The sender is notified via E-mail once the recipient has received notification of the message and again when the message has been picked up. If the certified message isn't picked up within 24 hours, the sender is notified and the message is held for for 30 days, after which it is returned to its sender. Certifiedemail.com also offers an online tracking system, which enables you to check the status of your sent message at any time -- just like the "Show Status" feature of other other secure E-mail services, such as America Online's. An additional benefit of using this Web-based service is you never have to download anything to your hard drive, since you're looking at your message on someone else's server. Stay alert, because E-mail is on the move. New services are popping up all around you. You don't want to be left in the cyberdust when it comes to electronic messaging.
By Jessica Loudon in New York RELATED ITEMS
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Updated Nov. 13, 1998 by bwwebmaster
Copyright 1998, by The McGraw-Hill Companies Inc. All rights reserved.
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