CompuServe Corp, soon to be subsumed into America Online Inc, has POP3-enabled its email to keep it fairly distinct from the mass market AOL. This enables CompuServe users to pick up their email from any other POP3 client, such as Qualcomm Inc’s Eudora and browser-based email. Microsoft Corp is in the process of doing the same for Microsoft Network’s (MSN) email. The company will also offer additional fee-based services, such as the ability to receive in a single mailbox, email, fax and voice messages and have email re-directed to pagers. Also promised is a lifetime email address, fax and voicemail numbers. All these new features will appear when the company launches its C service at the end of the year. Further down the line CompuServe plans prioritized in-bound messages based on users’ parameters, priority messages by sender and subject, outbound fax and the ability to retrieve messages via phone and through a browser, but there’s no timetable for those features. The fees for the new features will be announced at C’s launch. C is a web-based content-only membership-based service, announced in mid-October and available in the US and Canada only at launch.
