A Reliable and Economical Means to get Your Emails When Traveling.
Executive Summary
Staying in touch in today’s world for most people means emails as well as other forms of communication. When traveling, accessing your emails by ordinary means is not always convenient and is sometimes impossible. An alternative solution exists that is both reliable and economical.
Not Always Accessible
Many travelers, both frequent and infrequent, near home or in a foreign country, face the problem of not being able to access their emails while on the road. Required Internet access is sometimes expensive and inconvenient or simply unavailable. Being used to typical email access through broadband Internet at the office, travelers can become extremely frustrated when the only thing available is low speed dialup.
Devices to access the Internet such as laptops, Blackberries and email enabled cell phones may be expensive to own, expensive to use, confusing and in some cases when traveling simply constitute excess baggage. When today’s Internet access dependent technologies and devices don’t meet the traveler’s needs they can look to another solution.
A Common Denominator – Access to a Phone
Whether you are at the cabin for the weekend, in your car traveling across town, in Bolivia touring a tin mine or sitting at the airport waiting for a delayed flight, in most cases you may not have easy access to the Internet, however you probably have a phone available or are within minutes of a phone (no, it doesn’t matter if it’s a cell phone, a pay phone or land line phone). By using a phone and Email2Phone an Internet based service, you now can have complete access to your emails.
A Simple Solution
Having access to a phone and a subscription to an email2phone.net account provides the traveler with the means to listen to their emails as voice messages. Email2Phone converts ordinary text emails into phone voice messages that can be delivered to any phone or phones or retrieved by dialing into Email2Phone. It also provides the user with the capability to configure their account and access messages in text form online.
Email2Phone works with incoming emails that are sent directly to the user’s email address at Email2Phone; or emails that are forwarded to the user’s email address at Email2Phone from email accounts such as AOL, Comcast, etc.; or the user may dial in and access unread emails in their AOL, Comcast, etc. email accounts. This provides the traveler with a variety of options for receiving emails or gaining access to their email accounts when on the road.
Some additional attributes that give Email2Phone users unique advantages in normal use or when traveling are:
- a multi-layer filter feature that can be used to filter out the emails that you do not want to receive or to direct specific emails to specific phone numbers. This provides the business user for instance, with an option where they may only want to receive emails from company management or certain customers.
- a multi-phone number capability that allows the user to direct email voice messages to more than one phone. This feature for example, would allow a user to direct email voice messages to a business phone, home phone and cell phone. Calling can be set up to be dialed simultaneously or sequentially.
- a phone key response system like ordinary phone voice mail that allows the user to save, reply, skip and delete email voice messages and when dialing in to email2phone.net to select the messages that they want to listen to.
- a reply feature that allows the user to send a voice reply that is sent back to the email originator as a notification email with a link to a voice file that contains your message. The voice file can be listened to on most computers with audio software and speakers.
- automatic spam filter
- easy set up
- maintenance free
Money Matters
The economics of Email2Phone are based on a low monthly service charge that includes a substantial number of phone credits. Monthly calls beyond the allowable phone credits incur a minimal charge. email2phone.net services are available in three different packages with each package including free Email2Phone dial-in service and a specified number of call credits. The basic package costs $10.00/month and includes 40 call credits. The number of call credits used will vary depending upon the destination country. For example, U.S and Canada a one minute call uses one phone credit; a one minute call to France uses two call credits; a one minute call to Sweden uses one call credit.
Julie’s response when asked how Email2Phone worked for her was “it has opened a new world in communications for me. I am kept informed of what is going on at the campus where before I felt alone. I have never felt so connected and self sufficient. It’s a tool to help persons of blindness and/or visually impaired to keep in touch with work, friends, and family. It has given my boss and me an opportunity to communicate on a more structured basis.”
Additional features and benefits of Email2Phone that Julie sited were not having to maintain anything, ease of interaction via the telephone (she compared it to common voice mail systems) and the cost of $10.00 per month, which she felt was more than affordable.
Conclusion
Whether you are traveling for business, vacation or some other reason, access to your emails is simply a phone a way.