How do you send e-mail from a laptop? With a desktop it’s usually simple - just use the SMTP server of the ISP you are hooked up to. But a laptop gets carried around and connected through different networks. My home ISP’s SMTP server cannot be accessed from my office network, and vice versa. What do most people do? Run a SMTP server on the laptop under Windows? (I hear they exist but haven’t tried one yet - are they reliable?) Or are there any web-based mail services that allow you to send mail from any connection?
For a while I found Yahoo! Japan Mail account to work well. It allows SMTP access if your IP address has been POP authenticated recently. But it only accepts mail with my Yahoo! address in the “From:” field, and I’ve found that some people have trouble reaching this account. (Presumaby because of the aggressive spam filter.)
Um, I didn’t phrase my OP correctly, sorry. I didn’t actually mean web-based mail, I meant commercial e-mail service that allows both web and POP/SMTP access. Doesn’t have to be free, but needs to be reliable.
How is the Yahoo! Mail in the US? How is the spam filter - anyone have problems with false positives (personal mail rejected by mistake)?
An interesting problem you have… you’re sure you can’t just tweak your email program settings a bit? I’m running Eudora on my laptop and using it to collect email from 5 different POP accounts (2 separate work-related accounts on completely different private servers; 2 Earthlink acounts; and a Yahoo account), and I just use the SMTP server of my cable ISP (when I’m home) to send mail for all of them. If I’m traveling, I do have to change the SMTP to Earthlink’s server inside Eudora, but then everything is hunky dory.
At any rate - both Earthlink and Yahoo allow pop access as well as web access. If you already have an ISP, you might prefer to just pay the premium fee that will allow you both POP access and extra storage for Yahoo. I don’t have the huge spam problems some folks seem to have with their Yahoo accounts, but I will admit that the filter is kind of sucky. Earthlink makes a big deal of their Spaminator, but I still get a ton of mortgage/Viagra emails on that account all the time.
Just a thought - have you ever tried http://www.mail2web.com ? I’ve used it to check and send email from both work accounts while traveling away from home, and it worked great. It does put a small advertising tagline at the bottom of all your sent emails, just like Hotmail and free Yahoo do, but it’s not obnoxious. Just remember though: if you delete a mail from mail2web, it WILL be deleted from the server!
I was hoping to avoid it since I take my laptop home every day and use e-mail there. But I just found out that the latest version of my e-mail client can be set up with multiple profiles which makes it easy to switch between two servers. It may turn out to be the best solution.
The POP access for both of these cost money, right? Still, if they are reliable enough to be my primary personal address it may be worth the cost. I don’t want my personal e-mail address to be tied to my ISP (which isn’t nation-wide, let alone worldwide) or my office (hardly a permanent position!).
Yes, both Earthlink and Yahoo with POP access will cost you money. Earthlink has a number of dial-up plans starting at $21.95/month for unlimited connection time, which may be a bit excessive for you since you already have an ISP for home. There used to be a $9.95/month fee for 5 hours time, but I don’t see that plan offered anymore, unless they just aren’t advertising it. Yahoo charges $29.95/year for a mailbox with 25 MB storage (instead of 4 MB), so it’s probably a better deal for your situation. Both of these have been very reliable for me, so as far as I see it’s just a matter of cost and perks.
Re spam issues - I never really had a spam problem with my Earthlink account, until one fine day I registered at a home pricing web site. Then the flood of spam began. Never used my Yahoo account for anything similar, so no probs there. So I guess it’s all in how you spread yourself around.
Thanks again. I’ll look into both Earthlink and Yahoo POP access.
I’m not concerned with having too much spam. I’m more concerned about an overly aggressive spam filter blocking important mail by mistake, which apaprently happened a couple of times in the past week.
I have my own domain hosted at my ISP in the US and travel often. My POP and SMTP severs just require a password when logging on from outside the ISPs own network. I have 7 e-mail accounts on the domain and have plugged in my iBook in internet cafes all over the world from Poland to the Republic of Georgia… never been a problem.
I’m on a PowerBook. I have different TCP settings saved for the different places I hook up to. At home (mine or girlfriend’s apt) I’m on DSL and I have TCP settings that connect me to Verizon’s DSL which we both have. At work in the NY office I have two different static IPs and each of those TCP settings have their own router and DNS Server address and whatnot. At the NJ office they use DHCP so when I’m out there I switch to a TCP setting that gets all its parameters from a DHCP server. Then I have a dialup PPP setting which gets me on via my Earthlink dialup account. Finally I have AOL Link which lets me attain a TCP/IP connection as a consequence of connecting via AOL.
I switch between settings by opening the TCP/IP Control Panel, going Command-K, and picking which setting to switch to. The moment it is switched the new connection takes effect. (For dialup or DSL I need to launch the program that establishes the actual connection). Alternatively I could (but don’t) use the Location Manager which switches TCP and AppleTalk and a half-dozen other variables all in one click. (With me the only thing I change is TCP so I don’t need Location Manager).
Under MacOS X, if I’m booted there, I make the switch using the Location submenu in the Apple Menu. The MacOS X Location submenu works like the MacOS 9 Location Manager except that setting it up is so much more integrated with the Networking System PrefPanel. This one was designed from the ground up for folks to make their network-prefs changes from the Location submenu, whereas the MacOS 9 Location Manager was an add-on hack.
I use Eudora to send and receive all my email. I have personalities for incoming mail for my regular personal email and my work account. I have separate personalities for sending email in such a way as to work around the restrictiveness of Verizon DSL and Earthlink by which they won’t let you send outbound email from their SMTP servers unless you’ve obtained your IP from them – these personalities utilize my static (or DHCP) addresses at work and use their mail servers but input a different FROM header and REPLY-TO header so that all my outbound personal email comes from my regular personal account even if I’m sending it from work; and utilize my Verizon DSL SMTP server to send outbound email with the FROM and REPLY-TO headers reflecting my Earthlink account (which is my regular & original personal email account). I have filters which recognize incoming email from any of the different POP servers I access and sorts it into the different appropriate inboxes (or the Trash, for all the mountains of spam that I get).
When I’m far from my home digs I look up some dialup numbers in the area I’ll be going to and I set them up as separate PPP settings. I can switch PPP settings the same way I switch overall TCP settings, so I have stored dialup numbers for upstate NY, western Massachusetts, and Georgia, and when I’m home again I just go Command-K and switch back to the standard NY setting. (Not that I use dialup in NY very often these days).
The only thing I haven’t done yet is spring for one of those fancy-schmantzy Black Box digital phone line modem adapters that let you connect via dialup from some office where the IT folks are being uncooperative about setting you up with a TCP address and SMTP account. Oh, and I haven’t forked over for an AirPort card yet, I’ll probably do that even sooner. With those two suckers added to the arsenal I should be able to get online pretty much anywhere. (I even have an Erikson phone adapter that lets me use a cellphone with my PowerBook modem to get online).
