WiFi Savvy

Last week I told you that you could check your home-based email by visiting the provider’s website. We call that webmail. When you use programs like Outlook, Outlook Express, Entourage, Eudora, or Vista’s Windows Mail, we call that client-based email. This week I want to explain the difference between the two, and why you would choose to use one over the other.

Your email provider
Who is your email provider? If your address ends in @comcast.net, then your provider is Comcast. If your address ends in @telus.net, your provider is Telus. With all the Canadian snowbirds, I’ve been doing a lot of configuring Telus email accounts lately!

There are hundreds of email providers, Verizon, BellSouth, Yahoo, MSN, AOL, Gmail, Roadrunner, Earthlink are all email providers and they all have webmail - a way to access your account thru their website.

What if you have a custom email address? For example my address is @geeksontour.com. GeeksOnTour.com does not have it’s own email server. I have to know what company is the host for GeeksOnTour. Since I set it up, I know that the host is GoDaddy.com. So, my webmail is available at Godaddy’s website.

Your email software: webmail or client-based
When you access your email, you are using some kind of email software. If you’re accessing your email via the web, you’re using software on your email provider’s website … webmail software (and each company’s can be different.) If you’re accessing email via software installed on your computer (Outlook Express, Eudora, Windows Mail) we call that client-based software. Your computer is a client to the Internet.

Regardless of the software you use, your email is originally delivered to your account on your provider’s email servers. Think of those email servers as a Post Office where you have a PO Box. All mail addressed to you is delivered to that PO Box. Using webmail is like you physically visiting the Post Office to read your mail. You must be online to do this, once you lose your Internet connection, you can no longer read or send email.

Using client-based software is like having a mailman who goes to the post office for you and gets your mail, delivering it to your computer. Once it’s on your computer, you no longer need the Internet connection.

Configuring your Email Client
Most people, when given a choice, prefer to use client-based email. I mean, who wouldn’t choose home delivery over having to visit the post office? For travelers, who only have sporadic Internet connections, client-based software is nice because you can read and write your email when you are offline. You only need the Internet to get new mail, or to send mail. You can also set up your email client to get your email from several different accounts, bringing it all into the one program on your computer. This way you can have many different providers, but only need to learn one program.

So, what’s the catch? Well, sometimes while traveling, you want to check email when you don’t even have your computer. If you use webmail, you can read and send email from any Internet-connected computer. Also, when you travel there are problems in regards to sending email. Sending email is handled by a different server than receiving. It’s called an SMTP server (Simple Mail Transfer Protocol) and there are customized settings to make it work when you travel. Many email providers have different SMTP settings, and you may even have to change the settings to match an individual Wi-Fi hotspot.

The best option of course, is to use both! With most email providers where you pay for their service, you can access your mail with their webmail software OR with your own client-based software. For example, Bellsouth.net offers webmail, and they also offer what is called POP access. POP stands for Post Office Protocol, IMAP stands for Internet Message Access Protocol, and one of these is necessary for using client-based email software.

If your email provider is not a ‘POP’ or ‘IMAP’ email provider, you can’t use it with an email client such as Outlook. Most free email providers do not offer POP or IMAP access. A shining exception is Gmail. I’ll cover the details of how to set it up in a future article.

Chris Guld,
www.GeeksOnTour.com

It wasn’t that long ago that Pocketmail was our only option for email that we could use as we traveled. Now, with Internet connections available almost everywhere we go, email should work just like at home, right? Well … almost.

A friend of mine recently took a short trip from his home in Florida to North Carolina and he took his laptop computer (with WiFi) with him, but he said he couldn’t get his email because that always comes into Outlook on his desktop computer at home. I taught him how he can check his email from anywhere, and the same technique should apply to you as well.

His email is @bellsouth.net. So, all he needs to do is go to www.bellsouth.net - in your case it may be www.telus.net, www.comcast.net, or whatever the website is for your provider - and find the link to log in. On Bellsouth.net there is a spot in the upper right that says, “Sign In”. It doesn’t mention email because that is just one of the services provided for customers. Once you sign in with your account’s username and password, you will see a link to check your email. Other providers’ websites specifically link to ‘Webmail’ or ‘Check your Email’.

The point is, as long as you know your username (same as your email) and password, most providers give you a way to see your email thru their website. You don’t have to have Outlook, or any other email client, set up. You don’t have to have a specific webmail account like Yahoo! or Gmail or Hotmail, you can check your regular email on your provider’s website. If you don’t know your email provider’s website, or it’s not working right, you can try www.mail2web.com. It’s quite amazing. You don’t even need to be registered with them. Just enter your email address and password, and it will go retrieve your mail! It can even get your email on corporate accounts.

Once you know how to check your email from your provider’s website, you can make a shortcut to that on your desktop, or put it in your favorites. There’s a video on my website that teaches how to make a shortcut. It’s on the ‘Essential Skills‘ page, then click on ’shortcuts.’

If you are going to be traveling for extended periods, you may be canceling your service from Bellsouth, or Comcast, or whatever you use at home. Then, having a gmail account is a great idea. We like gmail a lot! We have a tutorial video on our website about how to sign up for a Gmail account. Just go to ‘More’ videos, and click on ‘Get a Gmail account.’

Next week I’ll tell you how you can have the best of both worlds by setting up Outlook Express to work with your Gmail account.

Chris Guld
www.GeeksOnTour.com

If you see an RV nearby with a Datastorm satellite dish, odds are they have an active Internet connection and a wireless network. The dishes I’m talking about are bigger than the TV dishes, and they’re oval in shape. Here is a picture of ours:

If you see one of these dishes nearby, you should look on your computer and see if there is a corresponding wireless network showing up under ‘View Available Wireless Networks.’ If you find it, you may be able to connect and get online.

Using a neighbor’s Internet connection is like borrowing anything else that belongs to them. You need to ask. You’ll find that most RVers are happy to share. But they certainly don’t have to! They paid a lot of money to get High-Speed Internet access – they may want (or need) all the bandwidth for themselves.

Most RVers will secure their wireless network with a password (key). If you ever see GeeksOnTour.com show up as a wireless network on your list – it means we’re nearby. Come say hi! We’ll be glad to give you our key to use the Internet from our Satellite dish.

If you do ‘borrow’ your neighbor’s Internet connection, don’t abuse it. Use it only for checking your email and simple web-browsing. Don’t watch streaming videos or download large files. There is a limit to the amount of bandwidth that most satellite dishes are allowed per day. If you push your neighbor over that limit, they can lose their high speed Internet for a period of time - usually 24 hours. That would make the dish-owner pretty grouchy! You don’t want to be the cause.

It is a great way to get Internet when there is normally no access. I know people with Internet satellite dishes who are very popular with caravans to Mexico! Because of their dish, the caravan is a traveling Wi-Fi hotspot. We just used a friendly RVers dish to provide Internet access to a meeting room at a rally … read the story on our blog.

Chris Guld
www.geeksontour.com

Last week I told you about Photo Story 3, a great way to make a movie from your photos. But, once you get the movie completed, then what? It plays great on your computer, but the people you want to share it with aren’t sitting next to you, they may be scattered all over the country.

Photo Story 3 can render your movie small enough to send as an email attachment, but it’s awfully tiny. If you have your own website, you can upload the full-size video (a .wmv file ) and set up a link so people can download and view it. This will be the highest quality. Macintosh users won’t be able to view it properly though - see the comments to last weeks’ post. Uploading videos to Youtube.com is probably the most popular method of sharing videos. That is really quite easy. You need to set up a Youtube account - it’s free - then use their ‘upload’ tool to get your video online.

Here is a video I just made for this blog post. It is 7 photos with music and narration added by Photo Story 3. I used all three of the above techniques to share it with you. You can click on each of them to see the difference.

1. Email size video: 269k

2. Full-size .wmv file hosted on my website: 2.23 megabytes, be patient!

3. Full-size .wmv file uploaded to Youtube.com you will need the Flash viewer. Those are three choices, but there is a 4th - and it’s my favorite. Use Picasa! You’ve probably heard of Picasa for managing your digital photos. Picasa makes it one-click easy to upload your photos to a web album. If you want to learn how, watch the videos on my website. Web Albums are provided free of charge courtesy of Google, the owner of Picasa. What many people don’t know is that Picasa will upload videos to your web album as well as photos.

4. Full-size .wmv file uploaded to Picasa Web Album

Both Youtube and Picasa Web Albums convert the movie to a flash format and compress it. The quality suffers in the process, but I think the Picasa version is at least as good as the Youtube, and I like having the video in the same location as all my photos. Chris Guld www.GeeksOnTour.com