Gloria Hill

A: It is, but only if you use a standard POP3 e-mail account. Most ISPs provide their customers with a POP3 e-mail account. If you are using Outlook Express, Netscape Communicator, or Eudora, you most likely have one. If that's the case, you can use one of the free e-mail services available from a companies such as MailStart (www.mailstart.com), (see FIGURE 1) or WebBox (www.webbox.com).

With MailStart you simply have to enter your e-mail address and password to see your messages. You can read your e-mail, reply to messages, delete them, or send new messages. All your messages will be available in your mailbox at home until you delete them manually.

WebBox is not as simple to use as MailStart-at least not at first. You have to register by filling in forms and providing survey information. But you get a lot more for your time and effort including an address book, a calendar, and 20MB of storage space. There are other extras if you pay $5 a month or $40 a year.

As I write this, however, MailStart has a serious compatibility problem: The service can't display an HTML-Base 64 encoded message originally created in Outlook Express. You can't even get plain-text versions of your messages. MailStart claims that it is working on a solution to this problem, but the company can't say when a fix will be available.

Neither MailStart nor WebBox will work with AOL accounts, but that fact really doesn't present a problem because AOL has a similar service that's available for its users. Go to www.aol.com.au and click the AOL Mail tab at the top of any page on the site. After you sign in, click the button that says Please click here to complete the sign-in process.

- Lincoln Spector