Need Recommended eMail Service for Iridium

[PamlicoTraveler]

Who has had good service for an email compression service? I need to be able to get email using my Iridium phone and am thinking of xgate. There appear to be several different providers of the same service.

Is xGate the best or are their others? Also, who should I get it from.

[speciald@ocens.]

I use xgate/ocens and it will also reduce the size and resolution of pictures automatically.

[Paul Elliott]

I use XGate and like it. OCENS is the same program, re-branded, so you might as well compare the package costs and choose accordingly. They are both good outfits.

If you already have a SailMail account, or even if you don't, Sailmail also goes a good job with satellite connections. You have to dig around on the sailmail.com website to find the setup guide: Sailmail access via Iridium. I've seen one comparison that indicates that XGate may be slightly faster than Sailmail (both using an Iridium connection).

With any of these, you're going to want to significantly shrink and compress any images you are sending. For blog postings I usually get the image size down under 30KBytes before sending, and that's going to take a few minutes to send. Don't plan on sending or receiving beautiful high-resolution photos or videos.

[PamlicoTraveler]

Thanks.. It looks like OCENS and xGate are the same price basically... So I am going to do a 3-day trial. Just wanted to see what others were using.

[Kettlewell]

I used XGate and it worked well. Luis Soltero is the guy who makes it and he is very helpful if you have any problems. You can have Sailmail forward text forecasts automatically to your XGate address as one way to get weather. Here's a quote from Sailmail:

You can use the SailMail system itself to receive text or grib weather forecasts at no charge. The easiest way (free) is to use SailDocs.com For information send an empty email to info@saildocs.com It is also possible to request no charge text forecasts directly from the US National Weather Service. For information, send an email to ftpmail@ftpmail.nws.noaa.gov and in the first and only line of the message put "help".

[Cormorant]

We had a good experience using Mailasail's Express Mail service.

Rates are similar to XGate, but I recall Mailasail was a bit cheaper. (It's been two years now since I signed up, so I forget all the details. . . .)

The service worked as advertised, and the customer service was very good when I had a setup problem, ultimately traced to our USB-serial adapter. Ed and Drew exchanged at least a half dozen emails with me to suss out the problem.

http://http://www.mailasail.com

[AngeW]

Thanks for starting this thread, I've been trying to find my way through the same questions. I'm keen to purchase an isatphonepro, and it seems sensible to use some kind of compression programme like Xgate. We are to be sailing mostly in the Mediterranean and want to be able to get weather reports. I'm a Mac user. I've been going around in circles on it lately - SailMail, Mailasail, Active Captain, Polar Navy, Macenc... ack! If anyone has a link to a simple summary that would be awesome. Every time I think I've understood, there seems to be something else to buy.

cheers
Ange