Read your email from any PC, anywhere

Helpline Q&A Directory

When I travel, I'd like to check my email on other people's computers without changing their settings or adding software. Is this possible?

It is, but only if you use a standard POP3 email account or AOL. Most ISPs provide their customers with a POP3 email 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 email services available from MailStart (www.mailstart.com) or WebBox (www.webbox.com).

With MailStart you simply have to enter your email address and password to see your messages. You can read your email, reply to messages, delete them or send new messages. All your messages will be available in your mailbox 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 we write this, however, MailStart has a 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 it can't say when a fix will be available.

Neither MailStart nor WebBox will work with AOL accounts, but that isn't really a problem because it has a similar service that's available for its users: AOL Anytime, Anywhere. Go to www.aol.com and enter your AOL screen name and email address in the AOL Anytime, Anywhere dialog box. Or you can simply 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'.