Sprint Services Eclipsed by Social Media?

Image via WikipediaOn Wednesday, December 31, 2008, Sprint will discontinue its PCS Mail and PCS Calendar services.

Because social media tools such as Twitter, Plurk and Utterli are making it easier for users to communicate, many legacy communication systems are finding themselves greeting retirement. With the popularity of easy-to-access mobile and free webmail options available, Sprint has found that many customers simply do not need its PCS Mail and PCS Calendar services. Therefore, these services are being discontinued. According to Sprint representative, Brittany W, "Picture mail is not being discontinued."

Although the PCS Mail product is being decommissioned, the outbound SMTP server will remain. Customers will still have the ability to send Outbound PCS Mail via Sprint's SMTP server. This means that not all of Sprint's email accounts will be discontinued. Only PCS Mail email is being decommissioned as of December 31, 2008. Depending on your device, you will have other email options such as Versa mail, Picture Mail, Sprint Mobile Email and other 3rd party providers.

If you are a Sprint Smartphone user (such as a Treo 755p) your Smartphone email client that you downloaded to your device will not be affected. Additionally, the 2 way SMS Text Messaging service will not be impacted and POP email accounts from any of the other 3rd party email providers (Gmail, Yahoo, Hotmail, Microsoft, Thunderbird, etc) will not be affected. Most of these email services are free, but check the POP email provider's agreement information before signing up for a new email account.

If you use PCS Mail as your mailbox (pop.sprintpcs.com and imap.sprintpcs.com), you will need to migrate your mailbox to a new POP/IMAP mailbox provider and reconfigure the client to use the new mailbox. If you use PCS Mail to send email (authenticated SMTP mail server smtp.sprintpcs.com), you may continue to do so without any problem; or, you may reconfigure your client to use a different provider. To get your saved emails and contacts moved to another provider, follow the instructions to create a new account and migrate your emails
and address book to your new email service. Review the Sprint PCS Announcement page for additional information.

Note that although Sprint's PCS Calender services are being decommissioned as of December 31, 2008, Sprint is unable to migrate your calendar to your new provider. If you regularly use the tasks and calendar services on your device, your best option is to sync your device to your computer, then sync to your new provider for these services. For example, Google Calendar supports syncing and has mobile set-up capability.

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Contact staff writer JC Lamkin at 215-843-1039 or jclamkinpmp@gmail.com.

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Today's "Two Tech Thumbs-down" Award goes to CAPTCHAs that Blind You with Science

Invented in the year 2000, a CAPTCHA is supposed to be a sort of security measure against computer robots that would like to mascaraed as humans. "Completely Automated Public Turing test to tell Computers and Humans Apart" (CAPTCHA) gives the user a challenge response news test to see if the user can identify or calculate a set of characters.

Using CAPTCHA technology minimizes spam traffic through a given site. There is only one draw back, however. The CAPTCHA also often minimizes a user's patience. One of the most frequently used CAPTCHAs is the distorted characters CAPTCHA. Because the characters are generally hyper-distorted, sometimes even humans can not decipher the characters.

I occasionally teach computer workshops. At times during the workshop, I might instruct the students to register for a particular service. Subsequently, we may spend the next 20 minutes attempting to decipher the CAPTCHA on each others' screens. Some users become so frustrated that they want to give up before they ever get started.

While the CAPTCHA is helpful, we will need to create a better way to distinguish human computer users from robots. Until then, today's "Two TechCrusader Thumbs Down" award goes to CAPTCHAs that blind us with science.