The standard Express 56 dial-up plan is a no nonsense, unlimited internet access account that delivers high quality internet service with no hidden costs nor additional charges that blur the real cost of your internet access account. You pay only and exactly your monthly fee, no more, no less. There are no weekly, monthly quarterly or annual maintenance fees, no account keeping fees, no penalties for use of too little or too much nor any of the other hidden charges typically levied by many local internet providers. Again, Express 56 provides you with unlimited internet connection.

When you establish your account with Express 56, the following list of services are available to you automatically at no additional cost:

• Access to our system and internet service, 24 hours a day 7 days a week with no endless busy tones, even during peak periods,
• Two email accounts in the express56.com domain, one with your login name as the user part of your email address, and one that you can make up yourself,
• Web Mail, a very useful function that lets you access your e-mail through any Web browser on any computer,
• Ability to enquire about the status of your account, including full transaction history,
• A reasonable level of technical assistance via the telephone, web forums and email,
• Optional participation in the Express 56 member community, local web forums and other activities that may be arranged from time to time.

Subscription to any of our standard plans may be for business, educational or personal use; unlike many other ISPs, we do not differentiate nor change our charges or offer different connection plans according to the type of use you make of your connection to the internet.

Yes, all our Points Of Access (POPs) are 56K enabled.

Our 56k digital modems can negotiate 56kFLEX and V.90 connections. 56k X2 is not supported, but fortunately X2 was never too widely marketed here in US. In any case, most X2 and 56kFLEX modems can be software upgraded to V.90. See if you can contact the manufacturer of your modem via their web site - searching the web for the exact name and model number of your modem will usually yield results, but for many OEM brands of modem it may take some searching. First, check out the box and documentation to see if it includes a web site address.

If you require help in locating your modem's manufacturer to find a V.90 upgrade, contact our technical support staff to see if we can provide you with any useful pointers.

Unlimited access - that is, an account type that has no download or monthly time limits - is currently the only plan available.

Note that "unlimited" plans promoted by other internet service providers may have monthly time limits after which an hourly rate applies, download limitations and penalties or cut-off if they are exceeded, or offer a very low bandwidth internet connection.

Yes. Express 56 provides a full reseller program. Please enquire for details.

Contact our Billing Department at billing@express56.com and clearly state your question. You will get an answer within one business day (normally - within an hour or two).

No. Our accounting system works on the principal that you pay for access in advance. This simplifies the administrative overhead involved in maintaining your account, but it also means that we do not "bill" for accounts. Since our system is free of billing cycles, we can maintain an easy to use system that is purely a "flat-tee" basis.

No changes are required to reconfigure your Express 56 account for access from a new computer system. All of the configuration and changes necessary to dial into Express 56 from a different computer are made on the computer you wish to use.

See the Express 56 Setup pages for configuring a computer system for dialup access into Express 56. You may also contact our technical support for further assistance.

Other that connecting the new phone line to your modem, nothing.

Your login name is the user part of your email address, so if you change one, you change the other.

First, you need to contact us by phone in order to arrange for your account to be renamed. From the time we confirm that this change will be made, you must use the new login name to gain dial-up access to Express 56, collect your mail and access your accounting information. Several items may need to be configured on your computer:

• Change the username in your login profile (the top field in the Connect to window displayed by Windows when you initiate a log into Express 56).
• Change the user or account name field that your mail program uses to access your mailbox.
• Change your email address in any internet package where entry of your email address has been required.

No. You would have to purchase another dialup account.

A web browser is a program that allows you to access and view web pages and other resources available on the world wide web (WWW). Microsoft provide a web browsing program called Internet Explorer that comes with the Windows 95, 98, NT and 2000 operating systems, and this is by far the most common browser software in use. However, other web browsing programs are available for Windows or other platforms which you may be interested in looking at; by far the most common "third party" web browser in use is Netscape Communicator, which is available not only for Windows, but many other operating systems and platforms.

http://www.express56.com/.

There are whole technologies devoted to this topic, nor is it easy to answer this topic in simple terms. Locating information on the web is a skill you must gradually develop as you become familiar with the internet. When searching for information, you need to choose the right web search engine and enter information which will increase your chances of success. The information, or keywords, you use depends a lot on the subject you wish to locate, and how general a query it is. For example, if you want information about old model Ford automobiles, you may find that you get a lot of hits, most of which won't be the information you are looking for, whereas if you type in a specific model and/or year of car you will find the number of hits much lower, and the links brought up more relevant to what you wish to find.

There are perhaps half a dozen very large web search engines on the internet currently. Some of these are fairly simplistic indexes, which tend to group sites into categories. Some of them have much more powerful heuristic engines which provide very powerful lookup facilities. The quality of information available from these search engines is also highly variable - some queries will result in many dead links (the links displayed probably once existed, but have moved, been removed or perhaps the web site host has changed name or long since gone out of business). Unfortunately, no index or search engine is entirely free of dead links - the ever changing nature of the internet means that any attempt to index it will always be out of date, sometimes by a little, more often by a lot. Smaller search engines, or once which sepcialise in specific areas tend to go out of date slowly, so you may have more luck finding the information you are looking for on those sites instead of the very large ones which attempt to cover the entire globe.

You may find after a little experience that you tend to prefer one or two search engines out of all of those available. Of course, much depends on what information you are looking for, and the type of search you are conducting. If you are getting more success with some engines than others, then by all means prefer those sites and only fall back to the others when necessary.

Be sure to read the help pages provided by search engine sites. These can provide some very useful information that can help you greatly and speed the search process. For example, most engines allow you to prefix keywords with the '+' symbol, which forces the engine to match the following word on all pages it will match with your query. Matches on words which are not similarly prefixed will be optional, and while pages where a hit occurs will be considered a better match than those which are not, a missing key element could mean the difference between a link displaying at the top of the list which is not nearly as good a match (in reality) as one that appears several thousand items later.

Naturally, you do not want to scan many thousands of entries, and you want the most relevant information to appear first. This is where you need to develop some skill; even the ordering of words in your query can have an effect. If you find a plethora of pages being returned from your query which have no relation at all to the information you seek, then it is almost certain that you need to refine your query more.

Technical searches are by far the easiest, particularly those which have associated model numbers or brand names. Sometimes all you need for these queries is to type in the model name as the one and only keyword. The rule is, the more general the search, the greater the subject matter, the more links and the larger the number of irrelevant links.

Links to the main internet web search engines can be found on the Express 56 Home page page. Additional links and speciality recources can also be found on the Express 56 Portal page.

A term you will see often on the internet is URL, which means Universal Resource Location. The full name probably means less than the term URL, but to summarise, it is an address that can be used to locate a specific web page or resource. The term resource here may refer to files or running a program on a remote server that causes something to happen there, or information to be displayed.

All URLs have the same basic format. It consists of a protocol type, a server address (which may include a port number and login information for servers that require it), and a path. A URL is formatted as follows:

protocol://hostname:port/path.

The most common protocol type seen for web pages and resources is http, which stands for hypertext transfer protocol, but you will often see ftp as well, which stands for file transfer protocol. There are a variety of other different types of protocols as well, including https (secure hypertext transfer protocol), gopher, wais, news and so on. Most web host names associated with http servers start with www.some.domain indicating that it is www service; however, this is by no means a rule, and many http web addresses do not start with www.

http and https describe the same basic protocol, however, access via https is done over a connection that is encrypted, such that (in theory) only the remote server and your web browser can decrypt it. Https is usually used where some degree of confidentiality is associated with the information being sent or received, or one or both ends of the transaction wish some verification of exactly who they are dealing with. Http used where this is either not desired or not important, generally for pages and information that can be read and downloaded by the public.

Note that even though you may use the secure method for transferring data, this is no guarantee of confidentiality. This is particularly the case if you use a browser with very weak encryption (RC40); all web browsers exported from the US are built to only support this weak encryption by default, due to the US export laws preventing export of software products containing strong cryptography. There is some relief here, however. You can fortify Netscape Communicator to enable strong RCA encryption using a program known as Fortify for Netscape. A fortified version of Netscape will offer much more protection than normal. There is no similar patching program provided for Internet Explorer.

FTP stands for file transfer protocol. It is by far the most common method used to transfer files over the internet, even transfers initiated from a web browser.

Netscape 2.x and below, and Explorer 3.x and below do not support many of the features of HTML now in common use on the web. These browsers only support early versions of the HTML standard, and indeed many features of newer versions of HTTP are missing as well.

Express 56 recommends a version 4.x browser at least for best enjoyment of the world wide web. Current browser releases are Microsoft Internet Explorer 5 and Netscape Communicator 4.6. You can download these from Express 56, or you can order a CDROM from us with both browsers on it.

See previous question.

There really is no best browser for everyone's needs. A lot depends on personal preferences and prejudices. The mainstream products are both excellent browsers, and if you choose one over the other you cannot be said to have made a poor choice either way.

Express 56 only recommends a "version 4" browser or better. We do not favour one or the other of the browsers. Which you use is a matter of personal preference.

Yes. So far as we know, if you install both browsers on any Windows platform - be it 95, 98, NT or 2000, for x86, alpha, mips or power pc - there is no collision or conflict if you install both browsers. They will not, however, share information such as bookmarks. It is possible to export bookmarks from one browser to the other fairly easily.

Firstly, understand that HTML, the language used to construct web pages, was originally designed as a content language. Much of the rendering of the information in HTML documents is left to the browser itself. This has changed somewhat in more recent versions of HTML, which have tended to become more display oriented. However, there still are many minor differences between rendering in browsers, and each browser, and browser version, supports slightly different versions of HTML.

Rendering between MS Internet Explorer and Netscape can vary quite a bit unless the maker of the page has been careful in avoiding some fairly common pitfalls. Each browser reacts differently to missing or invalid tags, so if a page contains invalid code, the resulting display may be vastly different. Also, some authors may use some browser specific enhancements; these will work in the browser they were targeted for, but will not work at all in any other browser.

We certainly do. You obtain an email account automatically when you sign up for a Express 56 dial-up account. You do not need to use any third party email service, although you may choose to do so. If your reason for using third party mail accounts is because you wish to access your email from elsewhere other than Express 56, then you have to be aware that we have web interface for our mail server so that you can both send and receive email from anywhere you wish on our website using any browser. You can find login field on the upper left corner of any of Express 56 page.

The username (or account name) you use to log into Express 56 is the user portion of your email address. Your email address is username@express56.com.

Yes. However, if you prefer to save all of your email messages in the same place, then you should use our mail web-interface. You can fild login field for web interface at the upper left corner of any page on Express 56.

There exists a large number of programs that support sending and receiving internet email. We cannot possibly attempt to cover the exact details on configuring them all. Most of them, however, are relatively easy to install and set up, and all you need are the email settings which may be found on the Express 56 Mail Configuration page. Some additional hints may be found on the Express 56 Setup instructions for your operating system. Most email clients are not covered here though, but a reasonable rule of thumb is that most of these programs will request information when they are installed or when run from the first time. If not, then look through the menus for either a Preferences or Options item (or Accounts in Outlook Express).

We have no control over what other ISP's do with mail delivered into one of theiR mailboxes. You will have to approach them and ask if they are agreeable to forwarding mail to your Express 56 account. If not, there is little you can do, unfortunately. They are not obliged to provide such a service once you are no longer a subscriber to their service. You will probably find, however, that most ISP's are fairly reasonable if you approach them in the right fashion.

While we are of course unhappy to see you leave Express 56, we are realistic in that we know we cannot provide the ideal internet environment for everyone. Reasons for leaving us are varied, and if you leave us because you are dissatisfied with our service, then please let us know! We usually do provide this service when asked, and will redirect your email to an account you nominate for up to twelve months.

Hotmail.com and various other organisations on the internet offer free email accounts to the public. The catch is, these are web based email systems, similar to the one that Express 56 provides, that allows you to use your web browser rather than a specialist email client. Consequently, you will be viewing quite an amount of advertising as you log in and read your mail - this is how these organisations fund them. Of course, this may not worry you, and web based email may even be useful from time to time, as it allows you to manipulate your mailbox without forcing you to download all of it (this is the primary reason Express 56 provides this facility to its members).

Regardless of whether you decide to use Hotmail or a similar free account, your Express 56 account is effectively free since it comes as part of your Express 56 package. Hotmail and similar may be useful for people who belong to ISPs who refuse to forward mail should they decide to go elsewhere, since hotmail accounts are accessible from any ISP and are not tied to the ISP. One of the disadvantages in using hotmail though, is reliability, or lack thereof - it is common for hotmail to be unavailable for a day or two for whatever reason, be it network problems or problems with their server. The sheer number of accounts they deal with (which is in the millions) leads to these sorts of problems.

No. You need to do so via hotmail's web pages. Express 56 is not associated with hotmail or any similar free email domain.

Junk email is an unfortunate fact of life these days. These can be quite annoying, especially since you are charged for them. Once your email gets into the "bulk email" lists, it is extremely hard to remove, because these lists are compiled and sold (in fact, it seems that selling mailing lists is the only really profitable part of the entire bulk-emailing business!). Your address may have been obtained from usenet news postings, from web pages or even other mailing lists you may have subscribed to.

If you are having a lot of problems with specific junk mailers, then let us know since we may be able to block mail from that entire domain, especially if many users are being affected by the same site.

On the flip side, we would ask that all of our users refrain from trying to use bulk email as a means of cheap advertising. It may seem that this is an "ideal" way to advertise at minimal cost to yourself, but put yourself in the position of those who receive it - most people will not appreciate the fact that they are paying to receive your advertising, and certainly it will taint your product with an attitude that you do not care if you cost other people money - hardly a desirable image to project to potential customers.

You need to use the same method to get off the list that you used to subscribe to it originally. Many mailing lists are distributed with a standard footnote appended to every message that describes how to remove yourself from the mailing list. Others provide web based forms which allow you to subscribe or unsubscribe. Unfortunately, there are no hard and fast rules, but if you exhaust all possible avenues in trying to unsubscribe yourself from a list, try emailing postmaster at the domain from which the list originates. The basic internet mail standard requires that this username be a valid and real address for any mail server machine. While the person this reaches may not be able to help you directly, they can usually direct you to another email address where help is available.

In order to protect our users from denial of service attacks (that is preventing all users of our system from receiving any email because our disk becomes full), we impose a size limit of about 5 megabytes (5 million characters) on each individual mail item. This is ample for most uses.

If you wish to obtain large files from other people, you should investigate better methods for transferring them. You might consider ICQ, IRC, or one of the many other direct peer to peer file transfer programs available on the internet. Emailing files is extremely inefficient in any case - sometimes the actual size of what is transferred, since it must be done in encoded "text" or printable format, may be anything up to two times the size of the original file at the sender's system.

If Express 56 hosts your domain, we have a domain mailbox option that provides any number of accounts for your employees. Please enquire for details. If your business does not already have a registered domain name, we can register one on your behalf.