by Francis Townsend:  francis.townsend@bigfoot.com

In 1996, as I already had a PC with an internal modem, I decided it was time I joined the Internet. Till then the cost had been more than I could justify. Then I saw an offer in Tandy for a years connection at a reasonable price. I was supplied with two 3½" floppies. They contained:

• Trumpet Winsock as dialler

• Netscape as browser

• FTP for file transfer

• Eudora for E-Mail.

All that was necessary before starting was to ring a number for details of user ID, password, E-Mail address and the local telephone number to use. It appeared that Internexus was the provider on behalf of Tandy, but everything ran well. Any problems were sorted out by a visit to the Tandy Shop.

After 9 months surfing I received a letter from Internexus saying that they were discontinuing the Tandy arrangement. If I wanted to stay with them I would have to change to Business User status with a considerable price increase. A visit back to Tandy resolved that they had now discontinued their Internet activities but had negotiated with UK Online to transfer all unexpired time from the original start. At the end of this time I could then become a normal UK Online user. Their fees were larger than the original Tandy but were not exorbitant. UK Online supplied a CD with, this time, Internet Explorer 2. As this used a Shivra Dialler I no longer needed to use Trumpet Winsock. I carried on using UK Online and via downloads from the Internet updated the programs. I have now ended with Internet Explorer 3 and later versions of Eudora and FTP. UK Online included web space so I created my own Home Page, written in raw HTML, which I uploaded.

Recently Freeserve came on the scene. What they had to offer seemed too good to be true; free local call access, E-Mail and Web Pages. I popped into Dixons and collected the CD. The first problem was that it only supported Windows 95 and the salesman knew nothing about using Windows 3.11. The only suggestion was to ring the Help Line at £1 a minute. Having had experience of what time wasters help lines can be I decided to solve the problem myself. When I examined the contents of the CD I found the set-up file which contained all the required information, i.e. dialup phone number and domain information. Armed with this information I was able to alter my dialler and sign-up. The next problem was accessing the E-Mail. The Freeserve system is oriented about Outlook Express which was included in the Windows 95 Internet Explorer 4 on the CD. I like to use Eudora but I had not been able to get Eudora to successfully access Freeserve Mail Server. An E-Mail to Freeserve Support (which is free) could not provide the answer. What I needed was the POP Account and SMTP Server detail.

I recently resolved my Eudora problem on Freeserve. I found the answer in an entry in:

news://news.freeserve.net/freeserve.faq

lots of interesting things there. The following is the gist of an entry by Mike Mann:

Assuming user is Fred Jones with Jones as user name and fred@jones ....... e-mail address then the POP Account field should be set to

'jones.freeserve.co.uk@pop.freeserve.net'

Freeserve is unusual in that its POP3 server requires the fully qualified domain name as a user name. Eudora is unusual in that it requires the POP3 user name before the '@' character and the POP server name after the '@' character.

[Editor's Note: Freeserve is quite strict in its requirements. According to their CD you must use 32 bit Windows and just run the CD. This then installs IE 4.01 and performs all the necessary magic to sign up to Freeserve and subsequently access the Internet. There are no instructions whatsoever. To be fair I believe they did this to cater for the average Dixon's customer who would be new to the Internet. My Windows 95 set up was a virgin copy as far as the Internet was concerned so I just slammed the CD in and let it go. I did make notes of everything that happened but it did work (once I had a modem that worked!). I did not have to worry about setting up Dial-Up networking, proxy servers or any other techno babble. Unfortunately, because there are no instructions it does not help the technically competent to deviate from the standard path. We are all assumed to be idiots. However Francis found one source of information to help him through his difficulties. Another useful source is at  www.tech-info.freeserve.co.uk an independent source of Freeserve advice. The February issue of PC Plus gives Freeserve the big thumbs up and so do I. Maybe it is time for you to save your monthly sub to your ISP. Brian]

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