[WEB4LIB] mailstart.com

[Phillip Whitford]

We've been using Mailstart for about six months with no problems.  Even some
staff members use it when traveling to access their own accounts from other
public Internet access points.  Before we staring using it I tried to find
out a bit about them and I was not able to find any complaints about their
service.  I was concerned about providing passwords to Mailstart
(particularly staff e-mail passwords).  In a non-scientific experiment I set
up a special account on our staff e-mail server which I then accessed a
number of times via mailstart while monitoring it to see if there were any
problems.  I never noticed any.  Not even any Spam.  Maybe my mail is just
to boring to steal or tamper with.

-----Original Message-----
From: web4lib at webjunction.org
[mailto:web4lib at webjunction.org]On Behalf Of Miriam Bobkoff
Sent: Wednesday, November 18, 1998 6:46 PM
To: Multiple recipients of list
Subject: [WEB4LIB] mailstart.com


Has anyone looked at the mailstart.com service, which pops nearly any mail
account into a web browser?

I think what I want to know is, can it be as safe as Mailstart's About page
says (paragraph quoted below), or is password traffic going this way somehow
easier for the bad guys to sniff than, say, using Netscape's mail function
to pop one's mail. Or Eudora. Or telnetting into a shell account for that
matter. No matter what, you're sending a password, no?

I don't mean to reopen the argument about the place of email access in
public library internet services, but only to observe that since we do allow
it, this would get around the problem that pop users can't amend our
Netscape settings to pop their mail onto our machines (all that stuff is
locked away) ...

from http://www.mailstart.com/about.asp
"MailStart is able to access your email account because of standards set
forth by
the Internet Engineering Task Force (IEFT).  These standards have
homogenized
email access by developing 2 email protocols, SMTP and POP3.  Because
MailStart uses the standard email protocols, accessing your email with
MailStart
is just as safe as using any email client such as Eudora or Microsoft
Outlook.  For
more information on the POP3 and/or SMTP protocols see RFC 1460, and RFC
821 respectively.  Of course there are services that do not use the standard
protocols (ex AOL and MSN) and as a result MailStart will not be able to
access
these proprietary email servers. "

Miriam Bobkoff                        mbobkoff at ci.santa-fe.nm.us
Santa Fe Public Library
            who would like to know whether anyone out there using Outlook
Express knows how to make the
            From: line in an incoming message show by default the email
address of the sender as well as her name,
            instead of one having to click on
ile--properties--details,  --but can't think whom to ask...