Low bandwidth information by E-mail service
Version 0.9
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ElmerEmail is still in production and will be launching soon, please watch this space for updates.
If you are a backpacker, sailor, off roader, or any type of adventurer, you often go places without reliable internet access to get convenient and sometimes life-saving information. However, when the cell network is unreachable, you can still often get access to good old email through services like Winlink, Sailmail or Iridium. ElmerEmail uses plan old email to give you access to information.
Unlike many communication vendor provided services, ElmerEmail is completely platform agnostic. If you can send and receive email, ElmerEmail will work. It doesn't matter if you are using HF/VHF Packet email with Winlink, a complicated satellite based solution like those provided by Iridium or Globalstar, or just Gmail, ElmerEmail will work for you.
For over a hundred years, Hams have been pushing the limits of being able to communicate and get information around the world. In the Internet age, using staticky radios may seem passé, but being able to get access to vital information and help others when SHTF has always been at the core of Amateur radio. ElmerEmail is one more tool to help you get access to that information, communicate, and be informed.
Back in the late 1990s lots of people carried alfa-numeric “two-way” pagers that operated on the Motorola Re-FLEX protocol. These systems were often tied into email accounts that were specific to the paging device you carried. This way it was easy to send and receive email messages while you were out away from your computer. These were the early days of the Internet before smartphones, cellular data, and wifi, so having a mobile device that could get information was a big deal.
As these two-way email pagers grew in popularity, there arose some services which could reply to an email message you sent to them. These services could give you weather, news, sports scores, and package tracking information. You simply whipped out your paper, sent an email to one of these services and a few minutes later you got an email response.
However, we were on the cusp of much bigger things, and by the early 2000s cell phones had replaced pagers, and by the 2010s smart phones with data connections could give anyone almost unlimited access to human knowledge from almost anywhere people lived in mass. These email reply information services faded into obscurity, not even really remembered as a foot note in the Information Age.
For those of us who reside or venture far away from where people live in mass still find it challenging to connect to the Information Super Highway. For Sailors, backpackers, off-gridders, or any adventurer, communication and information is a luxury, and because it can be life saving, we often spend thousands of dollars on equipment and services just to get a trickle of data.
But even in an era of 5G and StarLink, email never died. Still today, a vast network of interconnected HAM radio operators maintain a system called WinLINK that allows up to send and receive email messages from remote locations. Companies like Iridium, Inmarsat, and Globalstar, operate satellite based communication systems where email is a critical feature. Unlike messaging services such as WhatsApp, Facebook, and Telegram, email is interpretable, universal, and as long as you’re not trying to send an entire family photo album, email messages are small and easy to send and receive.
The purpose of ElmerEmail to provide an easy platform for those people far afield to get access to information. We draw inspiration from those services in the late 1990s that could provide information via your email inbox rather than your web browser. Because we know that in some places, email can be your only link to the outside world.
As an aside, in the HAM radio world, a learned elder in the hobby is called an “Elmer”, so we decided to use that name as an homage to our HAM Radio roots.