Collecting emails on the move
What are the options?

Retrieving your emails when away from your home or office PC
A frequent challenge for people on the move away from home or the office, is how to send and receive any emails from their usual email accounts. So what are the options? Victor Smith offers some suggestions based on his experience of frequently working away from his office and often overseas. He has worked for short periods in mainland China and Moscow and still maintained email contact. In Moscow he continued as V8 Registrar and Scribe using email so knows it can be done even from remote places like that. (May 04 & April 04)

Essentially you have four options:

Laptop with a fixed line - simply hook up your laptop to a landline making sure you have a suitable plug - assuming the phone is not hard-wired to the wall!

Laptop and a fixed line

Laptop with a mobile phone - this needs some preparation not least ensuring you have a "roaming" service activated on your account and you need to load the mobile phone software on your laptop and ensure your email settings are set up in Outlook Express to work with the mobile phone's modem.

Laptop and a mobile phone

Web-based remote access service - Web2Mail is a particularly convenient service and is free! So if you can get access to the internet - either from your laptop, an office PC or at an internet cafe - you can collect or send emails using a Web2Mail account.

Web2Mail remote email access

3G datacard and laptop provides high speed internet access on the move using the new 3G mobile phone technology. The 3G datacard slides into your laptop. Vodafone provides this service with their Mobile Connect 3G Datacard but at present, the 3G coverage functions only in large cities and along the M4 corridor and in some cities overseas in Portugal, Italy, Holland and Spain. Where there is no 3G signal, the car reverts to the slower GPRS service.

Mobile Connect 3G Datacard