NEW YORK–With the debut of its Arch Message Center in November, Arch Wireless Holdings Inc. plans to simplify the lives of its customers by allowing them pager access to electronic mail from varied sources.
Available for a 90-day free trial with a $1.50 monthly cost thereafter, the new service is the result of a collaboration between Arch and Visto Corp.
“We essentially married our airtime and wireless messaging engine with Visto’s mail store,” said Jim Rodts, vice president of research and development for Arch.
“There are a lot of synergies between the companies, but it took a lot of development to make this seamless and transparent to the customer and intuitive to use.”
Arch’s wireless messaging engine provides the gateway to its one-way and two-way messaging networks, said William Tartaglia, manager of network systems development.
Visto stores messages entering into the Arch gateway from different electronic media, including operator dispatch, the Internet and voice mail.
For e-mail access, a text, numeric or two-way messaging customer chooses a single alias comprised of a name plus “arch.net.” If they prefer, customers can employ up to four such aliases.
Users can ask the server to access and aggregate messages from up to three Web accounts and one Outlook account, Rodts said. Customers also may establish message filtering parameters based on subject matter, key words, urgency and/or sender identity.
The first version of the service will permit subscribers to delete messages manually from their pagers, although not from the Visto mail store, Tartaglia said. The pagers typically store up to 100 messages, after which they delete the oldest ones automatically.
The next release, expected early in 2001, will duplicate on the mail store the actions pager users take in response to these e-mail messages, Rodts said. Those actions then will be translated and transmitted to the customer’s personal computer. Customers will receive an automatic upgrade at no extra cost.
The Arch Message Center service that debuts in November will allow paging customers to access and manage the aggregated e-mails on their personal computers.
