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Thursday, July 26, 2001

A few weeks ago, I wrote in this column about the typical online grocery shopping experience -- and how even the best of the best try to solve problems that don't exist. Since then, the biggest online shopping service, Webvan, has gone out of business. Several others have followed.

Webvan scored high marks for customer service. But the company simply didn't have enough customers buying enough products. Unfortunately, many of these delivery services count on customers to spend a lot of money. They put refrigerators in their garages and have sizable staffs of delivery people, each costing dollars that need to be recouped. One reader told me about a local service that delivers specialty items. Looks like a great service; but I'm not convinced that specialty items can be sold in sufficient quantity to support a business that has a large overhead.

I hope I'm wrong. Perhaps someday we'll really see consultant Cindy Harris' fantasy of a grocery Web site that will send an order to the local grocer, who will bag the order and have it ready to pick up at the door. That will solve shoppers' time crunch problems without the huge overhead of a delivery system.

Q: What criteria should I use to select an e-mail service?

A: You used to have to get your e-mail service from your own company servers or your Internet service provider. However, over the last few years, stand-alone e-mail services have become very big -- especially Web-based services, in which you send and receive your mail with your browser. So you don't need a separate e-mail software package.

Web-based e-mail packages have become pretty good. In most, you can send attachments (although the size may be limited), create html based messages that look great on a Web browser, and set up your own folders to categorize your received messages. The biggest advantage of these accounts is that you can access your mail from any Internet-connected computer anywhere in the world from that browser.

Companies that provide e-mail services include Microsoft (Hotmail), Yahoo! and Lycos. Perhaps a club that you belong to or the college from which you graduated also offer e-mail accounts. You can get your Web-based e-mail account in many cases for free. The vendor makes money by showing you ads when you're logged in.

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When you use these external e-mail services, you don't always get the full capability that local e-mail software can give you. For instance, Microsoft Outlook offers a number of mail handling features that don't work on Web-based systems (although Microsoft allows you to use Outlook with Hotmail). In addition, your e-mail resides on the Net instead of on your own system. So if your Net connection is down, you can't look at any of the stored messages unless you have copied them onto your local system.

I keep several e-mail accounts -- a few internal accounts as well as Web-based accounts. Just in case my local mail server goes down, I can usually get to my Web mail to send out messages -- although I can't reach any incoming mail that's sitting on the server.

A major advantage of multiple e-mail accounts is that you can allocate one account to use when posting messages in news groups, using chat rooms and forums. That way, when a spammer harvests the address, you can get rid of the whole account. You also can use a separate account when conducting business on eBay or other auction Web sites. With multiple accounts, you also can separate your home and job-related e-mail, while maintaining access to both from home and office.