The Mivo 250 operates on the same strong 900 MHz frequency that advanced cordless phones use. Plug the base station into a phone jack, turn the Mivo 250 on, then send and receive e-mail from anywhere in your home.

Send e-mail with the simple touch of a button. You can collect new e-mail manually or set it to automatically check at times you specify, so it won't be tying up the phone line; you'll be notified by the new-mail indicator light.

The Mivo 250 includes an integrated keyboard, antiglare tilted screen, and intuitive button layout. The ergonomic, portable design allows you to write e-mails on the go that send automatically the next time you connect to a phone line. The built-in memory saves 1,000 e-mail addresses and about 400 typical e-mail messages. Useful extras include an integrated calculator, clock, calendar, and spell-check with a 20,000-word dictionary.

I was given this address by mailstation customer service.

I am writing to request a refund for the mailstation 250 I purchased for my mother in March of this year, together with all monthly charges to date.

The machine is nothing but trouble. She has never once received an email from a friend of family member because AT NO TIME WAS SHE OFFERED A LOCAL NUMBER WITH A LOCAL SERVER. Further, after several attempts to contact customer service, IT WAS APPARENT THERE IS VERY LITTLE SUPPORT FOR THIS PRODUCT AND WAIT TIMES WERE WILDLY UNREASONABLE. To date, everyone involved has invested many hours attempting to make this grossly defective product work without any help from earthlink.

We give up. We want the money back. We would be delighted to return the machine.

Because the server in her area of Los Altos Hills NEVER was available, she has yet to receive a single email aside from those automatically generated by earthlink; annoying and repetitive statements welcoming her to earthlink. Furthermore, there was no customer service to help her. She was either disconnected or there was no answer from tech support after wait periods exceeding 25 minutes, and in one case, 50 minutes.

My mother is elderly and has struggled many hours enlisting friends and neighbors to teach her to operate the 250 without success. When I visited her this weekend I realized why. The server failed to respond over and over and over, and the machine itself was more complicated to operate than the mail program of a computer, less intuitive, and difficult to view and figure out. NOT what had been advertised; the ideal way for older people to learn to send and receive email.