IT'S YOUR EMAIL CALLING
Illinois-based Planetary Motion said that it has rolled out a new
email-by-phone service to 12 US cities and Toronto. "There are a lot of
people who want to use email, but they don't have a computer handy," said
Michael O'Roark, president of Planetary Motion, in a statement. "...With
CoolMail, everything is available over the phone." Called CoolMail, the
advertising-supported service lets a customer dial in to check one or more
existing email accounts from any telephone -- no computer needed. The service
then reads incoming messages to the recipient. The service is compatible with
any email account that uses a standard "POP3"-type mail server, the company
said. To reply or send a new message, users can speak messages into the
phone, and CoolMail translates the words into text for sending via
text-to-speech conversion technology. The service is free of charge, but
customers have to listen to a 10-second advertisement each time they dial in
to check messages. Local access numbers are available in New York, Boston,
Washington DC, Los Angeles, San Francisco, Dallas, Atlanta, Miami, Denver,
Seattle, Las Vegas, Milwaukee, and Toronto. Nationwide availability is slated
for the end of the year.  An 800 number is available for accessing the
service outside these cities, but a 10-cents-a-minute charge is incurred. In
addition to listening to messages, customers can delete them, or leave them
for normal retrieval later from a computer. 
http://www.planetarymotion.com/