Emailing Through Satellite Phone

KENAX Translation Agency and Outsourcing

I had this excellent and useful correspondence with one service which helps reduce emailing costs when using a slow and expensive satellite phone internet connection.
This page continues from Internet Connection While Traveling.
 

Dear Karel,

Before we allow any mail into user's accounts we do a reverse DNS lookup to the sending mail server to see if the address in the SMTP from line is a valid address. There are some mail servers, such as Yahoo's that will give a positive return even for invalid mail accounts. Yahoo deals with junk mail in other ways. This reverse-DNS lookup helps us capture between 50 and 75% of the junk mail bound for our users. Really this is not good enough, but it is a start.

For accounts that have a real problem with junk mail, they can deploy a white list. Addresses you email are added to the list. Emails sent to you from addresses not on the list will be placed on hold and a summary of the email (address, subject line, size) will be sent to you when you call in to get your mail. The problem with this white list is if you get a lot of spam and or a lot of legitimate emails from new addresses, it can be difficult to see the diamonds in the ruff.

The UUPlus satellite email service is a software solution. We have written software specifically designed for the low bandwidth, high-latency conditions in satellite phones. We also batch and compress emails so as to create as an efficient connection as possible. You read and compose messages off line. The average connect time is 86 seconds and in that time you will download email totaling 40K and upload email totaling 30K (on average). This average is a little skewed as some of our customers send and receive quite a bit of mail. You should be able to download 10 3K messages and send 10 3K messages in under a billing minute.

To set up a UUPlus account, you will need the UUPlus software, which you can download from our website or we can mail you a CD. The installation/configuration process only takes a couple of minutes. If at all convenient, I recommend you give us a call when installing the software so we can answer any questions you may have. We can also give you a brief tour of the capabilities of the software.

Your UUPlus account can be accessed by sat phone, cell phone, dial-up or full time connection, and via the web.

If you have any questions, please let me know.

Jeremy Bonnett

UUPlus
(p) +1 805 534 1425
(f) +1 805 534 9502
(w) www.uuplus.com
(e) jeremy.bonnett@uuplus.com

Our service fee is $35 per month. So the cost will be $35. This is separate from the cost of the satellite phone.

How do you currently upload files to your website? Do your customers email their attachments to a specified address on your site? If so, we can automatically forward mail over a specified size to that address. Would that work?

Our email service automatically strips the attachment from the email prior to you downloading the email. Once everything is downloaded it then reattaches the attachment to the email. If you connect using the Interactive mode with separated attachments on, the email and the attachment will appear on different lines. You can then download the email and not the attachment. However, we do not keep a copy of the email in the queue after you download the email. The attachment will just sit there by itself until you decide what to do with it.

We are thinking of adding a Forward message option in our Interactive download mode. This will allow you to download the email and forward the attachment somewhere.

We compress everything you download prior to you downloading it. All mail you upload also gets compressed. The client software you will use will automatically un-compress whatever mail you download.

What kind of files do your customers send you? If they are text files, they will compress by quite a bit. As will Microsoft Word files. I found a couple of Word files on your downloads page. One file was 55K in it's un-compressed form. I zipped it up just to see what the compressed size was and it compressed to 10K. A 10K file will only take a couple of seconds to send. Of course if you get a lot of them, it will add up.

I can help download those files for you, but it might be better if somebody at your company is responsible for this.

Actually, it can often be better to dial the #777 rather than our numbers directly. It usually saves you about 10 seconds of modem negotiation time.

When installing the software, did you select [New] and fill out the new user form. In that case, the UUPlus Personal software will list the account as anonymous@uuplus.com.

If the computer you are using is connected to the Internet connection in the library, change the dialing location (top, right in UUPlus window) from Globalstar to VPN.LAN and click [CALL] in the software.

If the computer is not connected to the Internet;

1. Click [Setup] in the UUPlus Personal software.
2. Select the [Modems] tab.
3. In the Available Modems list, scroll down the bottom and select "+VPN - GlobalStar Packet Modem" and click [Add].
4. You will now be on the [Calling] tab. Click [Done].
5. Assuming the Globalstar configuration is configured correctly all you will have to do is plug the phone in and click [Call].