Site News & Announcements

[BETA] Offsite Mail Service!

Greetings Members,

I'm pleased to introduce a brand new service from Writing.Com, Offsite Mail Service.

Offsite Mail Service is the ability to both send and receive your Writing.Com email through another service... such as Gmail, Hotmail, Yahoo!, iPhones or Blackberries. The technical terms for what we're adding are IMAP and POP3.

Please note, this feature is only available to members with a Premium Membership or above.


To use the service, you'll need to know the following:

Mail Server: oms.writing.com (oms stands for Offsite Mail Service)
Username: When asked for the username to login with,
                   use your full WDC email address, for example, [e-mail].
Password: Your email password is the same password as you use for the site itself.

If given the option between IMAP or POP, always choose the IMAP option. Doing so allows all of your mail folders to be available offsite, as well.

For best results: Select the option to leave messages on the server. That way, you can always read emails via the site. If you do not leave the messages on our server, they will no longer be available via the website email system.

In addition, when given the option for SSL or a secure connection, please note we are waiting on final configuration of our SSL certificate. That being the case, some mail services (like the iPhone) will allow SSL and give you a warning which you can click to ignore... And some services (like Gmail) will return an error. When in doubt is may be best to avoid activating the SSL connection.

          Need help setting it up? Try:   "Invalid Item" 

An important caveat is that WritingML is parsed by Writing.Com's web interface, not by the email server. Messages are delivered to your email box with WritingML intact. Any email you read offsite will not include any WritingML conversions... you'll just see the "raw" WritingML. While we may or may not make attempts to solve that in the future (even the solutions have problems), OMS still serves as an easy way to stay in touch. Again, we recommend members using the service select the option in their email service that leaves messages on the server so you can always read emails via the site.

Please remember this is an initial beta test phase. I've been using it on my iPhone for a number of months working out some issues, and I love it... and some of you have gotten iPhone responses from me.

As always, we appreciate your feedback and bug reports!

Best wishes,
~~SM