Email a Phone Call Away

By Larry Anders, Librarian, Tampa PC Users Group
larry.anders@gtemail.net

I’ve been doing this PC stuff so long now that it’s been a while since I’ve found something really interesting. Well, the other day I was doing a routine search for something I can’t even remember now and up popped this link: http://evphone.com. I followed the link and read a little about E-mail Via Phone (EVP). It sounded good to me so I downloaded their 10MB trial version, which, by the way, on a cable modem only took a couple of minutes.

In a nutshell… EVP will call you and read you your email or you can call your computer and have EVP read your email to you. The keyword here is read. EVP uses a text-to-voice engine to translate your email text to an easily understood electronic voice that even seems to put some emotion into it sometimes.

I downloaded, installed, ran setup and it didn’t work. I then went back and read the instructions, but evidently not very well because it still did not work. I sent an email to their online support and within an hour I had an answer back. I re-read the instructions and help file and it made a little more sense to me then. (As I said above… the keyword was read.) It actually did work and quite well.

First of all, you need a voice modem, and make sure you have the latest drivers, to eliminate some problems if your driver is kind of old. Although I installed a cable modem sometime back I still kept my 56K voice modem installed and now I’m glad I did. But that wasn’t my problem. You also must have a standard email account (POP3). Although I have RoadRunner installed I continued to use MSN for my email, which I had prior to RoadRunner. I didn’t want to change my email address again. But MSN uses a secure server to access their email and EVP doesn’t support a secure server. That was my problem! So I activated my RoadRunner email account, which is a standard email account, and soon I was hearing my email, and quite well too. Along with the above you also need Windows 95/98 (NT and Win2K are currently not supported), a 486/66 or better, 8MB of RAM and a sound card.

Some other things you can do with EVP (from their website) are:

Check e-mail automatically.

· Check in pre-defined time intervals.
· Check for E-mail at a pre-defined time using EVP's scheduler.
· Check it daily, weekly, weekdays and more.

It's a phone call away!  email_phone.jpg (974 bytes)

· You can call E-mail Via Phone anytime you want.
· Schedule a call to your phone whenever you like.
· EVP's rule system allows you to specify when EVP will call you.

Filter undesired e-mail messages.  email_phone.jpg (974 bytes)

· Delete a message based on sender's name.
· Use a keyword in the subject to delete.

Listen to whatever you like from the message.  email_phone.jpg (974 bytes)

· Listen only to the subject and/or sender’s name.
· Customize what you want to hear.

Browse e-mail messages using your phone.  email_phone.jpg (974 bytes)

· Skip to the next message.
· Repeat the current message.
· Listen to the previous message.
· Delete the message.

Supports Modem and Network users.  email_phone.jpg (974 bytes)

· Dial-Up networking using a voice modem.
· Network Users, Cable Modem, DSL Connection.

It only costs $29.95 but you can download a fully functioning trial copy and use it for 14 days to try it out for free. They even give you a 30-day money back guarantee after you purchase it. I don’t see how you can go wrong with this. If you decide to get it let me know and you’ll be hearing from me soon! u