Much has been said and written about the challenges of staying online while enjoying RV travels. Most of this pertains to the various options RVers have for their "primary" email access. RVers who have internet access via AOL, or other big national providers such as AT&T's WorldNet, Microsoft Network, etc., often find local telephone numbers along the way. But many RVer haunts are well off the beaten track, and require toll free or credit card access -- assuming we can find a modem friendly RV park or other creative solution along the way.

There are times, however, when we either don't have a laptop with us, or just can't find a place to access our regular online service providers. Is there a backup solution? You bet. Enter the world of web based email. What I'm referring to are the "free email" accounts offered by HotMail (http:www.HotMail.com), and a variety of other commercial providers. What they're offering is a free internet based email account for you, in exchange for the ability to flash a never-ending series of commercial messages across your screen as you use their email system. But we think this is a relatively small price to pay for the opportunity to have a secondary way to retrieve and send email messages when your primary option simply isn't available.

Let's look at some possible scenarios.

• You're in an RV park which doesn't offer modem access, but down the street is a public library which offers free internet access to the public.
• Same as above, but this time you're visiting friends in a far away town, and they have a home computer with local internet access.
• You're an overnight guest in an RV park, and the new friends you've just met in the adjacent space are there for 3 months, have a telephone hookup at their site, have subscribed to a local internet service provider during their stay, and invite you to use their computer to check your email.
• You're touring the downtown area of a town you'd always wanted to visit, and you pass a cyber cafe.
• You're in British Columbia, Canada. You really want to catch up on some important email, but even if you could find a place to plug the modem in, your 800 access won't work from Canada [Heck, you may even have been avoiding Canada for this very reason].

These are just a few representative examples, but some or all of them happen to most of us on occasion. In each of these cases you may not have your computer with you . Or perhaps you have a full size desktop model in your RV -- not exactly a convenient thing to lug into the office to plug into a phone line. But in each of these examples, you do have a way to get internet access.

So what do you do? If you have set up a free email account for yourself at HotMail (and we use this one only for illustrative purposes), you simply type in the URL (http://www.HotMail.com), and press the "log on" key. It will ask you for your username and password -- which you furnished when you registered for your free account -- and then call up your free email account.

Now here's where it gets interesting. Most likely few people will have sent email to your HotMail address -- unless of course you specifically asked them to do so. So how do you "get" the email sent to your regular email address? Easy. When you register for your free HotMail account, you're given a number of options. One is to enter the name and password of up to four other email addresses you have on other servers. These are called "POP" accounts. By simply providing the information about your primary email provider (the server's mail address, usually something like "mail.yourserver.com", your email ID, and your email password), when you later click on the option to "Get POP mail", or some other command that lets you access your "other" email address, it will go to your primary server (home ISP), retrieve any new messages waiting for you, and put them in your HotMail inbox. There you can read them, send a reply, forward, or do anything you normally would do. If you're connected to a printer, you can of course print a copy.

One VERY important item to remember: When you're registering for your free web based email service, and filling in the information to enable retrieving new email from your primary (POP mail) server, we recommend choosing the option which will leave the original unread message on your primary server. Otherwise it will be deleted, and when you're back online with your primary email provider you won't have the option to download the file into your own computer.

Is this a "cure all" for the challenges of getting email on the road? Hardly. But it does provide regular ISP users with another tool to use when at some point you find you don't have direct access to your primary email provider, but do have an unanticipated way to get internet access via some other computer. A downside, of course, is that you can't "take your email with you", read it later off-line, and compose a response off-line. Everything has to be done on-line, which is more time consuming and less "relaxed". There are certain other advantages offered by free web based email, such as the ability to include wonderful graphics within an email message which will be read online. And keep in mind since it's always done through a local internet access point, you'll have no need to make long distance or even surcharged toll free calls to get email from your "home" email provider.

However, the point of this article is simply that RVers should give serious consideration to registering with one of the free web based email services as a backup which may well come in handy as you roam America's scenic byways enjoying the RV lifestyle. Since we first wrote this article, several of the major nationwide service providers, including AOL and ATT WorldNet, have created their own web-based version for their subscribers to send and receive email when they don't have local access, or don't have access via their own computers.

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