FIGURE A


This was a strange Pocket IE behavior. Roll over picture for a larger image.

It might be possible that a Windows CE H/PC Pro device, equipped with Pocket Internet Explorer 3.0, might be capable of completing this operation but I was not able to test that option. So, I had to use my desktop PC equipped with Microsoft's Internet Explorer 5.0 to fill in this form. That process completed without incident.

Another "feature" that I knew would take some time to grow accustomed to would be the use of numeric digits to login, rather than text. I generally don't like numbers for login information, so I wasn't too fond of this.

When I began to navigate around the Member Page for information about configuring my email client to access their POP3 servers, I became aware of a few things. As seen in Figure B, when using Internet Explorer on my desktop machine, I didn't like how the page looked. It was pretty crowded and busy.

FIGURE B


I didn't like their crowded and busy member page, even when viewed on a desktop machine. Roll over picture for a larger image.

The page layout was also not visually appealing to me while using Pocket Internet Explorer on my Velo, shown in Figure C. In fact, oddly enough, I found that the appearance of the service's pages and the use of numbers for login information closely resembled the approach of Mirabilis' ICQ.

FIGURE C


Those small icons and bunched text reminded me of Mirabilis' ICQ page. Roll over picture for a larger image.

Also, the information contained within the pages, to get acquainted with CoolMail's service, could lead you to believe that POP3 access is their primary method of providing you with email. However, the information that I found was very lacking and I was not sure as to whether or not I needed to use my member ID or my email name. I also learned that they did not provide an SMTP server for you to use with Bronze service and that only Silver accounts included this. In any case, I used my ISP's SMTP server and I also tried both my email name and member ID in Pocket Outlook's Inbox service configuration window as you can see in Figure D.

FIGURE D


Here's one attempt at configuring Inbox to work with CoolMail. Roll over picture for a larger image.

Neither configuration worked and I was repeatedly prompted with the error dialog that you see in Figure E.

FIGURE E


This dialog box became a common occurrence throughout my search for a solution. Roll over picture for a larger image.

I was a bit discouraged, despite my other gripes with this service so far, because I was sort of anxious to personally try the phone-based services -- out of curiosity. But, I had four other services to try so I moved on to the next one.

NetTaxi
NetTaxi is actually a whole collection of online services that also come in packages. We are only interested in the free services for now, so this is what we'll continue on to evaluate. A NetTaxi free account includes a personal Web site with ten megabytes of space (that space is shared between your Web site and your email account) and your address would read "www.NetTaxi.com/citizens/userid" so don't hope for your own domain name for free.