This story appears in the
May 1998 issue of
Entrepreneur.
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Web-based e-mail is coming into its own in '98. The big
plus: When your e-mail is stored on a Web site, you can check it
from any computer; there's no special software
required. That means your e-mail is as close as the
nearest "cyber cafe" in any city worldwide. If
you're in Singapore and your computer is at home, you can pop
into the airport's Internet depot, pay a few dollars to rent a
computer, log on to the Web, and read and respond to your mail.
Proof of the growing popularity of Web-based e-mail is that for
some months, AOL has been testing NetMail by giving members who are
using recent editions of Microsoft Internet Explorer the ability to
fetch their mail from a Web site (for more information, go to
http://www.aol.com). And
Microsoft recently bought Hotmail (http://www.hotmail.com) with the
intention of turning the Web-based mail service into a Web-based
post office for Microsoft Network (MSN) subscribers.
Don't use MSN or AOL? Don't feel left out. Free
Web-based e-mail is easy to find. Excite (http://www.excite.com),
Lycos (< a href=http://www.lycos.com>http://www.lycos.com),
Yahoo! (http://www.yahoo.com)
and even Entrepreneur (http://mail.entrepreneurmag.com)
offer it, and diligent surfers will stumble across many more
providers. One tip: In setting up a Web-based e-mail account, look
for a stable provider that's been on the Web for many months.
E-mail seems simple, but bugs have riddled some systems, and others
have suffered from security flaws. So choose wisely when setting up
a new mailbox.
To contact Robert McGarvey, visit his Web site at http://members.aol.com/rjmcgarvey