Welcome to the documentation for the MailASail email and our other services such as weather and our Web Diary.
The documentation is layed out in a rough reading order and grouped by service.
Internet and Email Setup
Note: Looking for our old downloadable "Book"?
We are trying to switch to a new style of documentation, but it's still an excellent guide.
Get it here: Setup Instructions.pdf
This section covers setting up your MailASail email account and also configuring your internet connection. You don't necessarily need to do things in exactly in the order shown, but note that the point is that we are trying to help you break the problem down into small steps so that it's easy to debug if there is a problem. Please don't just try and do all the steps in one go and hope it all works perfectly!
Note: You don't need a satellite or mobile phone to test the email setup, your normal dialup or broadband connection will work just as well. Some people seem to wrongly assume that you can only use our services over Iridium - in fact the computer doesn't even know how you connect to the internet and our services work over ''ANY' internet connection
1) MailASail Email Setup Instructions
One of the first steps is to get the ExpressMail software installed and your MailASail email account setup and working. As a side benefit of this step you will be able to use the utilities included as part of ExpressMail install to help setup your satellite phone in the next step
Note that you will need to have already applied for a MailASail email account from http://admin.mailasail.com/signup
Other useful documentation relating to the email system
- Attachments: What happens to them and how to I find them later
- Accessing the Webmail system
- Automatically forwarding email from your old email account
- Creating your own .com domain name. What does it mean?
- The Express-Mail FAQ
2) Satellite / Cell Phone Internet Setup
Note that we would suggest that you do NOT install the "Direct Internet 2.0" software that is supplied with some Iridium phones. Our software will do the same installation for you, but in a fully automated way. DI2 also seems to cause many people problems seeing the internet at all...
The next step is to install and configure your internet connection. You will find it useful to have already installed the Express-Mail software so that you can use the "autoconfiguration" utility to setup your satellite phone (see Step 1 above)
We have setup guides below for several devices on several operating systems. Feel free to request other guides if you think we need to add something
Not normally needed, but click here if you want some instructions on how to manually configure Windows with an Iridium phone
- Installing Iridium on a Windows PC (XP/Vista)
- Installing Iridium on a Mac (bit old. OS9 only)
MailASail Automatic Weather Responder Service
MailASail operate an automatic weather responder service in the style of Saildocs responder. This will be much faster to access for MailASail customers, with response times typically measured at less than 1 second.
For more instructions on using the system see:
MailASail Web Diary / Blog System
Our Web Diary (or Blog) system is a very simple to use system to post pictures, stories, videos and other messages up onto your own personal web page.
The key benefit is that email is used as the primary interface to post new entries and updates. You will need to sign up for an ExpressMail account because the Blog is part of that whole system