September 6, 2002
New Satellite Phone E-Mail Servers

And it seems we are not alone, increasingly we are finding that cruising yachts want to keep in touch by e-mail, either with friends and family or for business reasons, not just on an occasional basis from Internet cafes but also on board while they are cruising. When you have onboard e-mail you can also take advantage of various weather forecasting services by e-mail.

One option is to use HF radio and there are a number of e-mail services available. Alternatively, since satellite communication equipment and call costs have decreased dramatically (Iridium costs $1.50 per minute) many cruisers have opted for this method. But deciding which equipment to buy is not the end of the decision making process. Selecting which e-mail server to use can have much more influence on costs and ease of use. We have been experimenting with two new satphone e-mail services that reduce costs and offer good features for cruisers. As a result we have managed to reduce our costs by as much as $100 per month.

Two New Specialist Servers

There are a number of specialist e-mail servers for sat phones which attempt to overcome the problems of using conventional land based servers (if you are interested in the technical reasons why they are problematic see the notes at the end). We have used several over the past four years, with both Mini-M and Iridium. Two new ones offer new features of use to both light and heavy users of e-mail afloat and we found both of them effective and a significant step forward from those we have used previously.

The first, MailASail, is brand new and requires no special software, and works by reducing the size of e-mails by converting them to text-only and removing extraneous information. You access it using Outlook Express or similar e-mail programs, via Iridium's Internet portal - the Apollo controller. It is really geared to light users, those sending a couple or so e-mails every few days. A really useful feature is that incoming e-mails can be chopped up and sent to your Iridium phone using the SMS messaging feature, which is free. This means you don't have to log on every day to find no e-mails to download. And at $20 per month, it offers a very cost effective solution.

UUPlus, on the other hand, is geared towards large-scale users of e-mail. We send and receive most days, with 5 or more e-mails sent and received each time, and UUPlus has significantly reduced our connection times and costs. Rather than use Windows Messaging for the e-mail communications server, as do a number of other systems, UUPlus have written their own which runs in the background on your computer. Consequently it can be used with a number of e-mail programs, such as Outlook Express, Pegasus or Eudora (rather than being limited to the big and unwieldy Outlook required with Windows Messaging). As e-mails are "sent" from your e-mail program, the UUPlus server holds them until the satellite connection is made.

To send and receive, the server program is activated and the Call button clicked. Using their own communications program enables UUPlus to achieve the fastest logon we have seen, typically beginning to transfer e-mails within 10 seconds of the phone connection being made. The server compresses outgoing e-mails into a single file, which is sent simultaneously with the inbound e-mail file being received. As soon as the files are transmitted, the server immediately logs out and cuts the phone connection.

Sending and receiving five or more text e-mails each session, we have yet to be connected for over a minute, most are around 30 seconds. If only Iridium charged by the second rather than by the minute, we would save even more.

There are some very neat features as well. With UUPlus, the size of messages and attachments can be individually set to what you want, anything bigger can either be sent back to the sender, or diverted to your land based server. In addition, trusted e-mail addresses can be set up to overcome this limit so, for example, large weather forecast files can still be downloaded while the general attachment limit is set very low. Unwelcome addresses can be blocked completely.

It is also possible to "Fetch" messages from another POP3 server, so land based server e-mails can still be accessed from the sat phone.

UUPlus will work with Iridium, Aces, Inmarsat, Thuraya and Motient satellite systems, and the personal use version costs $30 a month on a one-year contract. UUPlus have also just released an HF version that works with Codan modems.

The software can be downloaded for free from www.uuplus.com and a step-you-through manual simplifies the setup procedure, which has defeated us with other systems. New users can even sign up for a free 7-day trial before committing any money.

Contacts

A Bit of Technical Background

With satellite phones, the most expensive connections are incurred when calling a land based e-mail server direct. Using Outlook Express, the server connects and after username and password have been validated the incoming e-mails are downloaded. The server is then disconnected and reconnected to send outgoing e-mails, after again validating username and password. Very time consuming at 2400, 4800 or even 9600 baud, which is the speed of most satellite phone modems, compared to 28000 or 56000 baud for a land-line connection. What's more, e-mails are transmitted uncompressed; not a problem on a land connection, but even more time consuming on a sat phone, even assuming that the server will accept such a slow connection. Hence specialist servers have been developed to overcome the problems.