Path: utzoo!attcan!uunet!decwrl!hayes.ims.alaska.edu!accuvax.nwu.edu!nucsrl!telecom-request From: FLINTON@eagle.wesleyan.edu (Fred E.J. Linton) Newsgroups: comp.dcom.telecom Subject: Re: Does AT&T Mail Exist??? Message-ID: <13794@accuvax.nwu.edu> Date: 20 Oct 90 05:43:05 GMT Sender: news@accuvax.nwu.edu Organization: TELECOM Digest Lines: 64 Approved: Telecom@eecs.nwu.edu X-Submissions-To: telecom@eecs.nwu.edu X-Administrivia-To: telecom-request@eecs.nwu.edu X-Telecom-Digest: Volume 10, Issue 744, Message 6 of 7 In TELECOM Digest, Volume 10, Issue 733, Message 11, the Moderator writes as follows in reply to sjr@m-net.ann-arbor.mi.us (Sander J. Rabinowitz): >You can also use the MCI Mail gateway to write to !atthelp at AT&T Mail. AT&T Mail now seems to have an Internet gateway as well, as I discovered shortly after my return to these shores after 11 weeks abroad. From an Internet site, I believe the address atthelp@attmail.com should work to reach AT&T Mail's Customer Assistance Center. From AT&T Mail, the "registered UNIX site" internet! acts as Internet gateway machine (a DIR internet! while connected to AT&T Mail's modem at 1 800 624 5123 will tell you all I know about that site). BTW, it used used to be possible to enroll with AT&T Mail on line at that 624 5123 ( = MAIL 123 ) number, but I've forgotten the magic incantations required. As to comparisons between MCI, ATT, and CompuServe e-mail services: my ATTMail telex number has my FEJLINTON userid as answerback, while my MCIMail telex number has the universal MCI UW answerback all accounts get. (CompuServe, last I checked, had one common inbound-telex number/answerback for all subscribers -- first telex-message line must be the recipient's ID). ATTMail retries telex sendings for at most four hours, while MCIMail lets you specify a longer retry period (this can be important when telexing eastern Europe) -- similarly for FAX transmissions (re CompuServe I dunno); ATTMail permits sending to a remote printer fed by modem from a phone line, while neither MCImail nor CompuServe have made me aware of any such capability on their parts; ATTMail permits bangpath-style addressing (which I prefer to X.400) in more contexts than do either mcimail or CompuServe; Costs are roughly comparable -- fax, telex, and paper-mail charges are sometimes lower on ATTMail, sometimes lower on MCIMail, all depending on length of document and destination (again, re Compuserve I dunno); MCIMail, unlike ATTMail, makes access to DJ/NR available, at added cost,while ATTMail, unlike MCIMail, lets you do a HELP UNIX [#] query, which will list all registered UNIX sites [whose names begin with the letter # ]; ATTMail recognizes a -C as a "get me a command-prompt NOW" interrupt, while MCIMail has no counterpart -- if something really long wants to scroll by you while using MCIMail, you've just got to wait until it's over (and that happened to me once -- the whole To:-list of one of the Boston Agency's periodic information bulletins had to expose itself to me, all of it -- and that while I was still using 300 baud! -- before the brief message came on); I've almost never hit a busy signal on _any_ of their modem lines. As you can tell, I use both -- and belong to CompuServe, too -- and am basically happy with what I get. PS: AT&T Mail's CAC phone number 1 800 624 5672 is basically a 9-to-5 operation as far as decent staffing goes. Fred ,