E-mail hits the road: CoolMail trades remote access for clients' ears

Some product names are right on the money. It was true of the Oreo cookie and the Ford Mustang. And it's certainly true of CoolMail, the remote e-mail access application put onto the Web two months ago by Planetary Motion. What could be cooler than having your e-mail read to you over the phone by a text-to-speech program-for free?

"The potential market is enormous," said Larry Zinox, Planetary Motion's co-founder and marketing director. "Our research indicates that 100 million people in this country depend on private or corporate e-mail." Planetary Motion is particularly interested in people not near a computer-travelers who won't lug a laptop or people who want to access their e-mail while in transit.

Clients log onto to the Planetary Motion Web site and sign up for CoolMail at one of several service levels-Bronze, Copper, Silver or Gold. Bronze, the basic level, is free. Members enroll, answer demographic questions, tell CoolMail their mailbox address and dial. An e-mail account must be accessible by Post Office Protocol 3 (POP 3). Yahoo! e-mail does not offer POP 3 access, America Online is adding it and Hotmail charges extra for it.

Clients either call a local access number in one of 12 major cities in the U.S. and Canada-Planetary Motion expects to extend that to 40 cities by the end of the year-or dial an 800 number provided at sign-up. The call is free, but using the service this way costs 10 cents a minute.

Before their mail is read, clients hear a 10-second commercial.

"Selling ads on the phone gives us some interesting capabilities," said Robert Newman, chief technical officer at Planetary Motion. "It can be interactive. If you hear a 10-second spot for low fares to London and want to know more, hit 1 and you get a 60-second message. Then hit 2 and get connected to an airline reservation agent."

"It's more like a click-through on the Web than a direct mail ad," added Zinox. "You know your message gets through because you push it into their ears." Advertisers pay about 15 cents a spot and only for ads delivered.

The company walks a fine line between giving advertisers the bang they want and getting in the clients' way, Newman acknowledged.

The CoolMail Bronze package is fat with extras: free e-mail for those who need it, the capacity to group several e-mail accounts, a contact management system on the Weband the chance to create four standard text replies of any type. Replies can be spoken over the phone and put into text via VCS PureSpeech for 2 cents per word or sent as audio messages to non-CoolMail members for 10 cents per message.

Higher service levels offer sexier technology. For $2.95 a month, Copper users can originate speech-to-text messages, send group e-mail and have messages forwarded. CoolMail Silver, debuting in September, will offer voiceprint ID for $5.95 a month. By October, CoolMail Gold service will function as a calling card. For $10.95 a month, the client can respond to e-mail by telling the program to dial out to a sender listed in the client's contact list and charge the call to a specified credit card number. Gold service also will permit call filters and rules: "Send urgent messages to my pager," for example.

Remote services such as CoolMail will be indispensable in the coming wave of convergence, said analyst Perry Belman of Kimbark Associates. "People are comfortable with the telephone and are becoming increasingly at ease with digital communication like e-mail and multimedia," he said. "It's inevitable that each side of the equation will shore up the other. When you can't get to a computer, you'll use a phone."

That seems an accurate forecast. CoolMail has signed up 50,000 clients, and capacity is becoming a concern. The central office is served by T-1 (1.5 Mb/s) lines, but the company soon will install a DS-3 (44.7 Mb/s) link for a quick response to growth. "That will let us add more T-1s as needed in days, not weeks," Zinox said.

Note to would-be advertisers: At last count, the average CoolMail customer was calling in to check e-mail 1.25 times a day. That's a lot of ears waiting to be pushed.

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