Have you been away from home and wanted to access your e-mail quickly and easily without installing your e-mail client on another computer? If you have access to the World Wide Web, then WebBox.com and their free trial service MailStart.com is a free trial way to check your e-mail from any web browser. Because few people or companies can or will allow you to modify the configuration of their e-mail package to check your e-mail, web based access is a wonderful help. Their pay service WebBox.com is reasonably priced and well worth it for those who need remote e-mail access everywhere they go.

MailStart.com and WebBox.com allow you to use your browser to read your e-mail, reply, forward, delete and send new messages, making your e-mail accessible from anywhere. There is no need to get a different e-mail address or have your mail forwarded, MailStart.com is a gateway that actually contacts your mail server and converts the content to HTML, allowing easy access to your regular e-mail.

MailStart is able to access your e-mail account because of standards set forth by the Internet Engineering Task Force (IEFT). These standards have helped define e-mail access by developing two e-mail protocols, SMTP and POP3. Because MailStart uses the standard e-mail protocols, accessing your e-mail with MailStart is just as convenient as using any e-mail client such as Eudora or Microsoft Outlook. Unfortunately, America Online (AOL) and Microsoft Network (MSN) do not use the standard protocols, and cannot be accessed through MailStart.

Because of the high amount of traffic on the Internet, it may take a while to retrieve the e-mail information from your server. Generally, the service is quite fast and retrieves e-mail within a minute or two. — So be patient, and do not hit the stop and reload button on your browser. MailStart has a good customer service system in place. If there is a problem accessing your mailbox, contact them. More often than not, they will suggest a remedy for the problem. If you consistently get an error message reading a particular type of message, then you can forward that message to MailStart. Their technical support staff will try to correct the problem for you, and in turn, provide increased functionality for all MailStart and WebBox clients.