Having to turn on your computer and link up to the Internet to check for new e-mail only takes a few minutes, but over the course of a day, the minutes add up.
But now there are alternatives to leaving your computer logged on all day to keep the immediacy in e-mail.
They all require that your e-mail is available via the POP3 protocol, which is used by most Internet Service providers–with the notable exception of America Online. AOL says it expects to have POP3 compliance soon, but doesn’t give a projected date.
The first alternative lets your e-mail page you. PageAbility from Software Labs (softwarelabs.com) is software, which runs on your computer, that constantly monitors your e-mail address.
When you get a message, PageAbility automatically signals your alpha-numeric pager and displays the header and entire text contents of the e-mail message.
PageAbility allows you to filter out unwanted messages and can be set up to forward only those that require your immediate attention. You can also schedule e-mail to come to your pager only during specific times of day. PageAbility sells for $69.95.
Another product lets you access your e-mail from any telephone. With Mail Call (mailcall.net), you call a toll-free number to access your account.
The service connects to your ISP, retrieves your e-mail and reads the subject line of each item aloud. You can decide which ones you want to hear in their entirety. The cost is $9.95 a month for the first 30 minutes of access and 19 cents a minute after that.
Based upon rules of grammar, the computerized reader is pretty accurate at vocalizing such abbreviations as “Dr.” which can mean either doctor or drive, and finesses words like “content,” which has two meanings depending on how it’s pronounced.
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Punctuation is vocalized as well; a comma causes a small pause, and an exclamation point causes the voice to sound excited.
Another nice touch is Mail Call’s ability to pronounce the emoticons that have become popular in e-mail messages. Emoticons are those little sideways faces: a 🙂 is a smiling face, for instance. When Mail Call sees this one, it laughs out loud.
Mail Call can also read e-mail written in Spanish. Other languages such as Japanese are planned to be added soon. Also, after hearing an e-mail you can elect to have it faxed to any location, such as your hotel’s fax machine, if you need a hard copy.
Finally, if you just want to know if you have e-mail waiting when you come home, or when you’re sitting in your office, without having to turn on the computer, check out Casio PhoneMate’s (casiophonemate.com) newest entry into the Internet arena.
Their IT-380 sports the conventional speaker phone and digital answering machine but adds a new feature: e-mail checking. With the IT-380, you see a green flashing e-mail light that alerts you to new e-mail. A three-line display lists all your e-mail header information, including the name of the person sending the e-mail, the subject and the time and date it arrived.
You simply set up the IT-380 to call your ISP, using your identification and passwords.
The IT-380 doesn’t light up as soon as e-mail comes in; you set it up to log on to check e-mail for you at intervals. But you can set it up to check up to several times an hour, or just once a day. It sells for $149.