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E-mail serfs, unite! How to cut the cord and win messaging freedom

By Mike Langberg
Knight Ridder Newspapers

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Drumroll please. I'm here to unfurl the E-Mail Declaration of Independence.

Article One: Your e-mail address should be your personal property, not tied to your Internet service provider, employer or school.

Article Two: Your e-mail should be managed online, so you can retrieve both new and saved messages from any computer or mobile device that's connected to the Internet.

Article Three: If you've followed Articles One and Two, you are free to change your e-mail host and your Internet service provider at any time without the hassle of having to tell family, friends and co-workers that your address has changed.

The rights enumerated in this declaration are inalienable, but they're not self-evident or without a certain price. Let me explain.

Most people are e-mail serfs, tied to a plantation run by America Online or Microsoft or their workplace or their university. If you have an aol.com or yourjob.com address, you can't leave AOL or your job without losing your e-mail address.

The ticket to freedom is registering your own domain name — the part of an e-mail address to the right of the @ sign — and then paying for Web-based e-mail service.

I'm not telling you to do anything I haven't already done myself. I registered the domain langberg.com in 1997, and my e-mail address has been mike@langberg.com ever since, even though I've made several changes through the years in both my ISP and the way I receive messages.

Signing up for your own domain, somewhat of a challenge seven years ago, requires little more than a valid credit card and a few mouse clicks today.
 
You do this through a registrar, a company that manages domain names. The largest is Network Solutions (www.networksolutions.com); another big contender is Register.com (www.register.com). Network Solutions charges $35 a year to register a domain ending in .com, or $25 a year if you pay for three years in advance.

Many of the most obvious domain names are taken, of course, but you can always look for variations. If smithfield.com is taken, for example, then you might be able to register smithfieldfamily.com.

Inbox 'host'

Many registrars provide an e-mail inbox, but I advise going a step further. For an extra fee, you can have the registrar forward all your mail to the address of your choice. This allows you to set up an online account to "host" your inbox, sending your e-mail to the address provided by the host. If you want to move to a new host, you only have to go to your registrar's online account-management page and change the forwarding address.

I'm paying $30 a year to Network Solutions for forwarding: $20 for an e-mail inbox, which I don't need but is required to get forwarding, plus $10 for "catch-all" forwarding so that I receive all mail sent to langberg.com. Catch-all forwarding is important because I want to get messages even if people mistakenly use the wrong name, such as michael@langberg.com or nike@langberg.com.

Most registrars also let you set up a Web site for an additional fee. Or you can pay for redirect service, so that anyone entering your domain name in a Web browser is automatically sent elsewhere. I pay $12 to Network Solutions for redirecting; if you type www.langberg.com into a browser, you'll be switched to the home page of my column on the Web site of the San Jose Mercury News.

Mobile management

Which brings us to my declaration's second part: e-mail hosting.

Most home-computer users get e-mail through software such as Outlook Express, Netscape Messenger, Outlook or Eudora. Saved messages reside only on the single computer running the software.

This approach worked well in an earlier era when most of us used just one computer. But today we often use several computers; one at home, another at work or school, a laptop, even computers at the public library. At the same time, saved e-mail messages are the filing cabinets of our busy lives, holding everything from driving directions for birthday parties to treasured love notes.

We need to be able to manage our e-mail from any computer that happens to be in front of us. The solution is Web-based e-mail, also known as online hosting.

Free but small

The big success stories in Web-based e-mail are the free services from Microsoft's Hotmail (www.hotmail.com) and Yahoo! Mail (mail.yahoo.com). But their inboxes are much too small for a busy e-mail life: just 2 megabytes (MB) for Hotmail and 4 MB for Yahoo!

Hotmail and Yahoo! both offer premium plans with greatly expanded inboxes and other helpful features. An inbox holding 100 MB costs $59.95 a year from Hotmail or $59.99 a year from Yahoo! That's enough storage space to maintain a hefty e-mail archive.

But Hotmail and Yahoo! insist on pestering premium subscribers with ads. I've been using a 100 MB inbox from Yahoo! as my primary e-mail manager for the past two years, but I just quit because Yahoo! keeps flashing seizure-inducing animated ads in my face.

Two startups offer well-designed, Web-based e-mail services that are blessedly ad-free: Mailblocks (www.mailblocks.com) of Los Altos, Calif., with 100 MB at just $24.95 a year; and Oddpost (www.oddpost.com) of San Francisco, with 50 MB at $30 a year. Both offer free trial accounts.

Happy discovery

What I'm really excited about, though, is a discovery made by my colleague Michael Bazeley: a service called eOutlook (www.eoutlook.com) from Cygnet Technologies, a small company in Highland Park, Ill.

EOutlook provides a Web-based version of Microsoft Outlook 2003, a combination e-mail program and personal organizer that's one of the best in the field, along with a 100 MB inbox for $7.95 a month, equal to $95.40 a year. The first 30 days are free, so you can try it without buying.

Using eOutlook, you can do just about everything that's possible with regular Outlook — only you don't have to install any software, and the service will work on any Internet-connected Windows or Macintosh computer with an up-to-date browser. Cygnet is also working to make the service compatible with mobile devices, starting later this month with the very popular BlackBerry wireless e-mail gadget.

But wait, as they say on late-night television, there's more! EOutlook also gives you a free copy of the full Microsoft Outlook 2003 software, which you can install on a Windows XP computer. The e-mail, contacts and appointments on your computer's version of Outlook are automatically synchronized with eOutlook.

Best of both worlds

This gives you the best of both worlds. You've got full access to your e-mail and personal-organizer data on the Web, but it's backed up on your computer. You can use the full Outlook installed on your computer to synchronize to a Palm or PocketPC handheld, with everything automatically flowing to eOutlook online.

I've spent several days working with eOutlook and I'm hooked. The service gives me sophisticated control over my e-mail, accessible anywhere.

There are many other companies providing similar online hosting of Outlook, but most are oriented toward business users and charge more.

Not that eOutlook is perfect. Cygnet Technologies is a five-person company that hasn't put enough effort into documentation. If you aren't already familiar with configuring e-mail accounts, and you aren't willing to make a few calls to Cygnet's tech-support line, you'll have trouble setting up an account.

Speed counts

Finally, there are also two important general footnotes to my e-mail declaration.

First, Web-based e-mail isn't practical unless you have high-speed Internet access, such as a cable modem or DSL line. The process is just too slow when you're connecting through a dial-up phone modem.

Second, domain-name owners get an extra dose of spam because spammers will often try multiple addresses for every domain they encounter. Make sure your registrar has a good spam filter in place before signing up.

Still, any problems you encounter on the path to e-mail independence are well worth overcoming. I like eOutlook, but they've got no hold on me. If the service doesn't ultimately meet my expectations, or the company goes out of business, I can switch hosts in just a few minutes. You, too, deserve the same freedom.

Copyright © 2004 The Seattle Times Company