If you are one
of those people who has lots of e-mail accounts such as AOL (news -
alert
- quote),
Earthlink (news
- alert
- quote),
Yahoo (news
- alert
- quote),
company e-mail addresses and now gmail, and can't keep up with checking
e-mails individually on each of the domain sites, then look no further: GopherKing is what you need.
GopherKing is a fee based service that enables you to access all of your
Internet e-mail accounts -- anywhere, anytime!
The idea behind
GopherKing is very simple - have one location for all of your limitless
number of e-mail accounts, and send and receive from different accounts
with different Internet service providers. Most importantly, it can be
viewed by most handhelds. Check for your device compatibility here: https://www.gopherking.com/connect/index.html?sessionid=ble.
DESIGN & FEATURES
When you log in to
GopherKing, you are welcomed with a text based (low-bandwidth) list of
various items. This design concept makes it the same interface for a Palm, a Pocket PC
or any mobile phone. The most important item on this initial screen
would be �my e-mails� which features a short summary which I liked the
best as you can scan for important messages to download and an �inbox�
for each of the e-mail accounts that you have set up.
Adding the
e-mail accounts to GopherKing is a snap! I had no problem setting up my
e-mail accounts, which included corporate e-mail, my Cox account, AOL,
Hotmail and Yahoo. But when I tried to add my recently acquired e-mail
account from Gmail it gave me an error �E-mail domain not found in our
ISP list.� It may be matter of time before this gets added to their ISP
list.

Once you are in
the inbox you would see a list of messages that have come from your many
e-mail accounts. The only thing I don�t like about this screen is that
you will see all the e-mails listed as one whole bunch instead of
individual groups based on each of the e-mail domain accounts.

You can
reply/reply all to your messages or forward or instead you can report the
message as spam or delete it. It eliminates Spam/Virus and HTML tags and
attachments. The worry of running out of space again on your Hotmail, MSN,
AOL or your ISP account is not there anymore, as there is an option to keep each of the
e-mail accounts on the ISP�s server or they can be downloaded to
GopherKing. Most importantly, and I think one of the coolest features, is
that you can receive an e-mail from one domain and reply with another
e-mail domain account. A great example of that would be to not physically
be in the office, yet send e-mail as if you were in the office!
Some of the features included in this service
are an online address book, My Files -- where you can upload files -- FTP
sites, spam filters for your e-mails, DNS lookup and Whois for Webmasters.
Some popular wireless sites such as ESPN and eBay are linked, as well as
the ability to browse/search the Internet, send a message to a cell
phone/pager, receive notification of new e-mails via any SMS cell phone or
pager, news updates, stock quotes, Internet newsgroups, bookmarks, ICQ instant messages, maps, driving
directions, search for Starbucks shop locations, dictionary Lookup with Thesaurus and weather reports for your
zip code.
The GopherKing
servers will scan for attachments with viruses, so you can relax about
accidentally forwarding a virus-loaded document to your supervisor! The
Spam filter works quite well, it is always running and cuts out the large
amounts of embarrassing spam and minimizes the amount of unwanted e-mails
you receive.
One of the
features that I like about GopherKing is that it has a single user
interface technology (SUI) which enables one to see the same user
interface, immaterial to which device they are using, and one does not
need to learn different programs to access the information. Also it
previews attachments, MS Word, Excel,
PowerPoint files, Adobe Acrobat files (PDF), Postscript files or any
picture.
I tested the GopherKing
on my Sony Ericsson (news
- alert)
T616 Web enabled phone to see how the interface looked. To tell you the
truth, it was a pleasant experience. I saw a somewhat similar interface to
the Web version, and having created the bookmark for the GopherKing site
now I can use it to check my e-mails while I am stuck in traffic during my
morning commute! (Yeah you�re right!)
CONCLUSION
All in all, I would say
GopherKing is the best service I came across in handling multiple e-mail
accounts quickly and with ease. The GopherKing subscription fee varies
from a $39.95-per-year
basic plan to a $99.95-per-year "gold" plan. The Gold plan includes 150 MB of e-mail storage and another 50 MB
of file attachment storage!
For Palm and PocketPC
owners, GopherKing suggests a free service called AvantGo (news
- alert).
This has an option that allows subscribers to send and receive e-mail
synchronizing a handheld with a computer. To read more about it go to www.avantgo.com. This option isn't a
substitute for real Internet access, but it does offer the ability to read
and compose e-mail while away from one�s computer.
The price is very reasonable if you are a user who
travels a lot and wants to keep up with all your e-mail accounts. Low
bandwidth text based design makes it faster and the device independent
interface makes this service a must have for any professionals who deal
with the hassle of checking each e-mail account individually. Go for
GopherKing!
Benzy Fernando is a TMCnet Technology Editor. He
can be reached via e-mail at [email protected].
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