You also receive one free email account at "something@NetTaxi.com,"; discounts on NetTaxi purchases, and chat room and message board accessibility. Overall, this sounded like a nice offer. I was still browsing using my desktop at this point and attempted to sign up for a free account. After entering the required information, I received a cryptic error page after submitting as you can see in Figure F.

FIGURE F


I'm not an HTML wizard, so you try to figure this one out. Roll over picture for a larger image.

I went back to that page, retyped my information, and pressed the Submit button -- again with no change. I made an attempt to sign on using my Velo 500 and ran into the same trouble. I tried for several days without success and deemed this service unreliable. Sign up for this service at your own risk. For such an important function to be out of operation didn't look promising to me, so use your own judgement when considering this service.

TeleBot
TeleBot is a somewhat similar service to CoolMail though the visual styling of this service looked much more impressive, as is presented in Figure G.

FIGURE G


A pretty home page doesn't necessarily mean pretty service. Roll over picture for a larger image.

After my previous experiences, I was having a bit of doubt at this point, so I proceeded with caution and with a heavy heart - would I have anything positive to review? TeleBot features a nice variety of options but as I stated previously, I wasn't really interested in testing these features -- but I'll make mention of them:

• Free voicemail with a toll-free number for people to access is provided. The sound clip (limited to one minute) is then saved and sent as a .WAV file to your email account, which fortunately a Windows CE device is capable of playing.

• Their Web site also mentioned the upcoming release of international toll-free voicemail numbers.

• You are also given free FAX receiving capabilities via your personal extension at a toll number and can receive up to 25 pages a day, which are sent to your email account as a .TIF image file.

• You can also send one-page faxes to anyone within the U.S. for free.

• You are given free paging notification of any new messages through your PCS/GSM phone, pager, or another email account.

You can also listen to your email and voicemail for free, if you live in the 408 California area, otherwise you'll pay the toll call. This is the same situation for users who want to fax you as they'll be sending a fax to a 408 phone number. It was noted that the phone-based email and voicemail service wouldn't be available until July 30th, 1999, however.

And finally, you receive a free Web-based/POP3 accessible email account with some limitations. You have ten megabytes of storage and can send up to sixty messages an hour. You are also limited to sending mail to fifty users per message, most likely an antispam feature in disguise. Your messages will contain advertising inline somewhere.