You might not know this but it is often impossible to send e-mail from your e-mail account unless you are on the company network where you work or you are using the ISP dial up or DSL connection where you have your Internet connection and get your ISP e-mail.

The problem with travel is when you are on the road, you are rarely on the Internet connection that hosts your e-mail. You have to get on the network where you work but sometimes that is a pain in the neck.

If you travel for the company on company business, you may have noticed that you can only send e-mail when you are connected to the company's e-mail server and are using VPN or some other means to connect to the company resources.

Or if you have an account with an ISP and get your e-mail at jane@yourisp.com you might also find that it is impossible to send or receive e-mail on the Best Western network from your motel or the Holiday Inn network if you are at the Holiday Inn.

You might have experienced these difficulties sending e-mails from your laptop or PDA from more than one location (i.e. at home, at work, staying in a hotel, visiting another city or even another country). This is because the e-mail server you have been assigned to only works when you are on the network that the e-mail server is connected to. As soon as you connect to a different network from the one your e-mail server is on, your e-mails stop working!

This is a security feature that ISPs and company network administrators call SPAM prevention or e-mail relaying. If you are on the network that is the same as the e-mail server, it would mean that you are authorized to use the network and that you were authiorized to use the e-mail server. If you are not on the network, your access to the e-mail server is blocked. No sending or receiving e-mails.

Why can't I just use Hotmail or Gmail or Yahoo? Many mobile users switch backwards and forwards between their regular email program and a web-based email program like Hotmail or Gmail or Yahoo. Sure, it's possible to use a web-based e-mail solution anywhere in the world, but these web based e-mail systems have their own disadvantages. Not only do you have to send all of your e-mail from a highly unprofessional email address like (cassieanddave@gmail.com, for instance), but it's also hard to keep track of your e-mails when you're hopping between your different email accounts. Who needs this pain? Wouldn't it be better to just use the same account, and the same email program, wherever you are?

There is another problem that is often overlooked. That is the size of attachments for e-mail. Most companies have attachment size limitations and any attachment over 5 or 10 MB will not go through the system. Wouldn't it be nice to be able to send up to 20 MB attachments if you wanted to?

And this is not to mention sending office and home e-mail from the same program if you wanted to. All your e-mail in one location. How easy is that?

Traveling E-Mail Solutions are all available from one place and the cost is very reasonable. If you send less than 50 e-mails a day, how does $23.88 a year sound? If you are a heavy user sending 50 - 150 e-mails a day, you cost is still a low $39.88.

You owe it to yourself to check out this low cost e-mail solution today.

Until next time, let me know what travel articles you would like to see, and how you are doing, O.K.?

Jim Fortune - the Bella Budget Travel Guy