Ocean Navigator Communications Newsletter #13

The Oddities of Email at Sea

As promised, this issue is all about the trials and tribulations of sending and receiving emails from the middle of nowhere. Or at least from the middle of the Portuguese coast. You'll remember from the last issue that we had several different modes of communication onboard our 47' ketch including Inmarsat C, Mini-M, Iridium, GSM, VHF, SSB, and even a couple of tin cans with a string between them.

Our skipper, Nigel, had his laptop connected to an Inmarsat Mini-M system which was his primary mode of email communication. He had a land-based account with MSN and a boat-account with Stratos. On land he checked both accounts, but on the boat he checked only his boat-based Stratos account to avoid downloading unnecessary junkmail. Friends and correspondants were instructed to send mail to the boat-based account for the duration of the trip.

I had a similar setup with two separate email accounts from my company, Marine Computer Systems. My usual address, dpiltch@marinecomputer.com was forwarded to my colleage Tim Hasson who laboriously sorted out all of the sex, debt, and make a buck junkmails and sent the rest on to my temporary boat-based account, portugal@marinecomputer.com.

Both Nigel and I had similar email experiences. Retrieving email was generally reliable albeit slow. Nigel was using Netscape's Communicator program, provided by Stratos, which forced him to download all pending emails. I was using FrontRange Solutions' GoldMine as an email program which allowed me to see the size of pending emails and then pick and choose which messages I wanted to download. This came in particularly handy when Tim sent along a large file (which I'd asked for). I chose not to download the message with the large file attachment, and waited until I found a hotel in port to use to connect via landline.

Sending email was a little more confusing. We each dialed in to a US-based Earthlink access number to get connected. Being on the Earthlink network means we had to use Earthlink's mail servers to send outgoing mail. These servers, like those at most ISPs, are set up to handle people connecting over relatively fast connections (dial up, DSL, cable modem, etc.) and don't generally deal well with us boat-folk connecting at sluggishly slow satellite speeds. For most short email messages of a page or less, the difference isn't really noticeable, however when we tried to send attachments back we noticed a significant amount of "dead air" time spent in waiting for the server during the longer transmissions necessary to squeeze the attachments over the connection. Earthlink's servers seem to be more responsive than those at America Online which used to have a reputation for abruptly disconnecting anyone who connected over a 2400 bps (typical satellite speed) connection. The optimal choice here would have been to use a gateway dedicated to satellite transmissions and specially tuned for slow speeds. Both Iridium and Globalstar offer just such a gateway, but with an annoying catch:

While these packet based gateways both connect you quickly to the Internet for viewing the odd web page or two and retrieving emails, they don't facilitate the sending of outgoing emails. Here's why -- when you connect over, say, the Globalstar gateway, your computer is temporarily a part of the Globalstar network as far as the Internet is concerned. This is fine for retrieving incoming emails from your own ISP's mail server. However, when you try to send an outbound message things get tricky. If you try to send the message through your own ISP's mail server, you won't be able to. This is due to security that's in place on the server to prevent people from anonymously sending out emails from other networks. In other words, as far as the server is concerned, "somebody from the Globalstar network is trying to use my own network to send an email and since I'm not sure who it is I'm not going to let them do it." The same is true of Iridium's setup.

A way around this is to use the Globalstar/Iridium gateways when retrieving emails, and your own ISP's access number for sending emails. Certainly not the easiest configuration, but once you get the hang of it, it's not so bad. When using Iridium, this extra step is really worth it as connections through their own gateway using the "Direct Iridium Data" service are billed at a lower rate (typically $0.99 per minute) than the connections made to your own ISP at $1.50 per minute. And you also get automatic data compression on these gateway calls.

A number of companies have caught on to the fact that this is more complex than it really needs to be, and are offering a more thought-out holistic approach to email access. SeaTel's WaveCall is a nice Globalstar-based solution, and MarineNet's Calypso software works both on their own HF network as well as over a Globalstar or Iridium network. Stratos offers their Stratosnet service which is free to their subscribers. SeaWave is about to release the next version of their Navigator software which was designed specifically with these problems in mind. They plan to handle and automatically route traffic on their HF network in addition to any other network you have onboard including Iridium, Globalstar, Inmarsat and more. Telaurus also claims to have a similar solution.

Though it's complicated to describe, it's really fairly easy to send and receive emails onboard once you have a setup that works for you. Both Nigel and I had lots of fun sending back trip logs, some even with digital photos that we crunched down to an appropriate size, resolution, and quality. The photos added about 4 minutes each to a typical email session. I've already started compiling all sorts of statistics -- average time to send/receive emails, total cost per day for emails, number of times per day I checked email(!) and so on. Stay tuned for the details.

- Dan Piltch
dpiltch@MarineComputer.com