 |
| CNN WEB SITES: |
|
| TIME INC. SITES: |
| MORE SERVICES: |
| video on demand |
| video archive |
| audio on demand |
| news email services |
| free email accounts |
| desktop headlines |
| pointcast |
| pagenet |
| DISCUSSION: |
| message boards |
| chat |
| feedback |
| SITE GUIDES: |
| help |
| contents |
| search |
| FASTER ACCESS: |
| europe |
| japan |
| WEB SERVICES: |
From...
Inbox to eardrum: E-mail access over the phone
July 17, 1998
Web posted at: 4:40 PM EDT
by Roberta Fusaro
(IDG) -- Gwen Costa, a Chicago-based independent contractor for Ernst & Young LLP's management workshops division, lives by her E-mail. Because she receives a continuous stream of work assignments and information primarily by E-mail, she can be lost without it. Literally.
Like on a recent trip to Boston, when Costa didn't get the word that her work team had changed a meeting location. "[The group] sent an E-mail and had called the hotel to let me know," Costa said, but she didn't have time to stop at the hotel or plug in a laptop computer to check for E-mail. "So I wasted two or three hours trying to figure out where the team had gone," she said.
Costa now uses CoolMail, a service from Glencoe, Ill.-based Planetary Motion, Inc., to listen to her E-mail messages over the telephone for free.
CoolMail users get free E-mail accounts or can tell the service where it can collect their E-mail. CoolMail software crawls through the accounts looking for E-mail headers.
A user dials in to a toll-free or local number, then enters a personal identification number and password to access the CoolMail server.
|
| ||
|---|---|---|
|
IDG.net home page | |
| Computerworld's home page | ||
| Computerworld "Emmerce" | ||
| Get Media Grok and The Industry Standard Intelligencer delivered for free | ||
| Reviews & in-depth info at IDG.net | ||
| IDG.net's personal news page | ||
| Questions about computers? Let IDG.net's editors help you | ||
|
Search IDG.net in 12 languages | ||
| Subscribe to IDG.net's free daily newsletter for IT leaders | ||
| News Radio | ||
|
Computerworld Minute audio news for managers | |
|
|
PC World News Radio | |
An automated attendant -- text-to-speech conversion software -- reads back the messages.
CoolMail is one of several unified messaging products -- software that will let users collect all their mail in one in-box for easy access -- that are trying to address the needs of mobile users.
Others are from Los Angeles-based JFax.com, which handles fax and voice mail and Internet-based E-mail; IPost from San Jose, Calif.-based start-up MediaGate, Inc., which offers one in-box for fax, voice mail and E-mail; and the MailCall text-to-voice converter from MailCall, Inc. in Fort Lauderdale, Fla.
Being able to retrieve E-mail over the phone lets Costa maintain a virtual office, which is important because she is always on the road, she said. "I don't have to carry a laptop anymore, and I always have my cell phone," she said.
Nina Burns, CEO and president of Creative Networks, Inc., a Palo Alto, Calif.-based research firm, said phone-based retrieval technology has been around at least 10 years but hasn't always been well-integrated with electronic messaging.
Phone Mail Pioneer
Novell, Inc.'s GroupWise was one of the first mail applications to offer phone-access capabilities, Burns said. That capability was built in to GroupWise 4.1 and lets users log in to the system and have their E-mail messages, calendar items and task lists read back to them over the phone, Novell officials said.
Dan Wood, a network administrator at the Milwaukee-based American Society for Quality, said his company uses GroupWise but isn't using its phone-access features. But as the company prepares to upgrade to Version 5.5, "we might take a closer look at that because we are getting more and more mobile users," Wood said. The organization has 230 employees and serves 140,000 members worldwide.
Eric Arnum, editor of the "Electronic Mail and Messaging Systems" newsletter in Forest Hills, N.Y., said unified messaging products such as CoolMail can be a lifesaver for people who don't have the time or space to plug in a laptop. But there are drawbacks.
Long-distance charges aren't cheap if you call from a car phone or cell phone, he said. And lots of E-mail messages nowadays consist of a text introduction and then an attachment, which voice-recognition systems usually can't pick up over the phone. And those products often need to be configured individually for each user, so they are tough to support across a company, he said.
Arnum said there are lots of alternatives for accessing E-mail, such as HotMail, a free Internet mail service, and cybercafes and other public terminals that you can rent cheaply.