August
25, 2004 mail2web.com® - a good addtion to any email tool kit We’ve talked about the free mailweb.com service in past issues, but it is so useful that Peter has decided to give it an in-depth look. mailweb.com has many uses, even for people who have their own web browser access to their email account. @ What is it? Most Internet Providers have a ‘webmail’ service but mailweb.com is sometimes superior, more reliable and faster. It’s worth trying in case it becomes useful at some time. mailweb.com is also available to access mail from PDA devices and WAP phones, something that most ISP’s are yet to provide. @ How it works? The mailweb.com system is very clever and you usually don’t have to mess with such things as POP and SMTP server names. Your email address domain gives the system enough clues to work it out. Either mailweb.com has the details stored for the common internet providers or can guess them. Hotmail accounts cannot be accessed via mail2web.com. Yahoo mail accounts can be accessed but only if you have setup your account to allow POP3 access. Once you have access, your messages are displayed. It’s much like any webmail page with options to reply and forward messages. Deleting is useful, if only to get rid of spam (sigh). A reminder that mailweb.com can only see email that is currently on your Internet Provider’s servers. If you leave your email client running then it may grab your email while you’re away and delete the copy on the ISP’s system. If you want to use mailweb.com then it’s best to close your email client beforehand, though most people do this as a matter of course. Your privacy? mailweb.com has a good privacy policy in which they undertake not to read anyone’s email. You also have the option to use SSL encryption to reduce the possibility of anyone spying on the traffic between the email host, mailweb.com and you. As with all services, on the web or the physical world, in the end it is up to each person to decide if they trust the service provider. @ Why use mail2web.com? The mail2web.com web pages are much less cluttered than most ISP’s. Many Internet Providers have gone overboard with web ads and fancy designs that can slow down display of the web page. On a fast Internet link you don’t notice this but on a slow link you can spend many minutes waiting for all this junk to load. mail2web.com gives you a way to bypass this and view your email directly and quickly. As some of you know, our editor-in-chief has taken to cruising on the Radisson Diamond ship that has an amazing satellite Internet connection, understandably though the link is slower than what we’re used to in these broadband times. mail2web is invaluable in situations like that, or in remote Internet cafés. Occasionally the ISP’s webmail seems to be broken and you can’t login the usual way. It could be that only the webmail interface is broken while the underlying email server (POP and SMTP) is running fine. If that’s the case then mail2web.com can get to your email. In short, mail2web.com is a useful tool for any email user. It’s worth trying it out and then keeping in ‘in the back of your mind’ in case it is needed. mail2web.com has an optional and free personalized login feature which stores your mail settings for future use. It also has an online address book (mail2web can’t view address books on other systems). Tip: when sending email from mail2web.com its best to send a copy of the message to yourself, since there’s no copy of sent items retained. You can enter your email address in the CC or BCC fields or just choose the ‘Send a copy to myself’ option for a new message. @ mail2web.com
for PDA’s mail2pda.com is the same service as mail2web.com just with a much smaller web page being sent. Some features, like sending attachments, can be limited. Not only can you use mail2PDA on a small screen but it’s also available on any web browser. This can be handy on really slow Internet links where every kb counts. There’s also mail2wap.com which brings your email to any WAP enabled phone. @ mail2web for
Exchange Server To access an Exchange Server computer you enter your server name, username and password. The username is in a specific <domain name>\<username>or <domain name >\<username>\<mailboxname> format if your user name and mailbox names are different. Note the use of the \ slash not the other way around. But since Exchange Server 2003 has webmail, PDA and WAP access, such facilities should be made available by your network administrator rather than you using mail2web. However, not all companies are using the latest version of Exchange Server or have enabled all the access options.Outlook Web Access has a nice look and functionality but sometimes it’s too much on a slow Internet connection, mail2web’s cleaner interface lets you do the job faster. Outlook Mail Access for PDA’s works but the mail2web interface is superior, for example it has check boxes to select messages and delete them while the Microsoft version makes you view each message before deletion. @ Does it work
for me? |