The Cutting Edge / COMPUTING / TECHNOLOGY / INNOVATION : A Bargain in Managing Your Electronic Mail
America no longer needs a good five-cent cigar. These days, where would you smoke it? No, what America needs now is a good, cheap electronic mail address. While we’re at it, how about an easy-to-use interface and a sensible way to keep track of incoming e-mail?
MCI Communications thinks it has the answer, and after trying out their new Friends & Family Mail, I’m convinced that they certainly have an answer for many users across the spectrum of experience.
Basically, anyone who uses MCI Mail’s Friends & Family long-distance service gets a free e-mail account with unlimited incoming messages and 10 free outbound messages per month. Additional outbound messages are 25 cents each, which isn’t cheap, but even sending a message a day would cost you just $5 a month, much less than most on-line services charge. And this is true Internet e-mail, so you can reach anyone on the Internet, America Online and so forth.
Moreover, MCI provides some nifty free Windows software for getting, receiving and managing your e-mail. The program is a scaled-down version of the E-Mail Connection from ConnectSoft, a useful commercial software package that enables you to manage your Prodigy, MCI and CompuServe mail in one place. (The Friends & Family version only works with MCI.)
Friends & Family Mail also lets you have up to five e-mail addresses as part of the same account, so different members of your family can have their own mailbox, or you can have separate mailboxes for business and personal mail.
Finally, you can use your Friends & Family Mail account to subscribe to a daily electronic newspaper called “News in Motion” for $9.95 a month, or 60 cents per single issue. You can tell the software to get your newspaper and all your incoming e-mail for you at, say, 5 a.m., while you sleep, and have it ready for you when you’re up and working on your first cup of coffee.
The nominally multimedia newspaper wasn’t half bad. Articles and photos come from the New York Times, Los Angeles Times and other top newspapers. It ran a little slow on my 486SX-25 despite 8 megabytes of RAM, and it also eats up a good bit of hard-drive space. It’s not very customizable either; you can’t specify stocks for it to track, for instance. But it’s easy to use, and kind of fun, even including the New York Times Crossword puzzle. (In the months ahead, I’ll review the various electronic newspapers being offered. )
It’s worth noting here that MCI is no newcomer to on-line services. Longtime denizens of cyberspace will recall that MCI Mail was an early entry in this whole field. My writer friends and I used it years ago to exchange messages, sample chapters and so forth because MCI Mail was simple and cheap, just like us. Unlike some other services in those days, MCI didn’t limit the length of messages, so we could be verbose. We could even use it to send faxes, and since none of us had fax modems or fax machines, this was fine. Moreover, we liked that it was just mail, at least until we all became geeks and switched to CompuServe. Today MCI Mail is still used by many businesses.
Friends & Family Mail clearly is aimed at consumers, and for the most part hits the target squarely. For novices looking for a cheap and easy way into the whole world of electronic mail, this is a fine place to start. For experienced users, who already probably have two or three other addresses, it’s awfully handy to have a place for all those mailing lists to dump their daily load (remember, incoming mail is free), and it’s nice to be able to easily establish separate accounts for family members, or for one’s different business and private personae.
The Friends & Family Mail software makes things especially easy. You read and write messages off-line, without tying up the phone. You can set up all kinds of folders for storing messages, and the program even has a search function for those important messages you can never seem to find again. Addresses from incoming messages are captured automatically to your address book and a host of other nice features are offered.
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On the down side, the installation routine adds a program to your Windows Start-Up group, something that is always annoying, but you don’t need it unless you want to be able to send mail directly from such applications as Microsoft Word.
I have two other gripes. One, I wish outgoing mail were cheaper, or that MCI offered unlimited outbound messages for, say, $10 a month. And two, I wish you could choose a user name instead of getting allocated a series of numbers @mcimail.com. (If you choose an unusual user name, or have an unusual user ID--DAKST, for example--you can indeed get mail at it, e.g., dakst@mci mail.com. But don’t try this if you’re JSmith.)
Still, this is an awfully cheap and convenient way to get e-mail. Access to the service is via an 800 number, and there are no upfront or time charges. Even non-MCI long-distance customers can use the service.
The bottom line: I can’t say this is any reason to switch to MCI, but if you’re an MCI Friends & Family long-distance customer and you have a personal computer, you really ought to sign up for Friends & Family Mail. It’s a very attractive deal.
Daniel Akst, a Los Angeles writer, is a former assistant business editor for technology at The Times. He welcomes messages at akstd@news.latimes.com but regrets that he cannot reply to everyone.
