Loa Power Tools: Haven’t Heard of It? You Will
I frequently mention Loa Power Tools on podcasts, but I don’t think I’ve ever blogged about it.
I’ve been a subscriber for the last six months or so and I can’t tell you how frequently Loa saves my rear when trying to send an email from a wifi hotspot, airport, university building, etc that doesn’t want to work well with my email client.
Or if you have an AT&T DSL line at your office space like I do, you know the frustration of trying to send out through an SMTP other than AT&T’s designated one. Loa solves that.
Yes, I do love and use GMail, but there’s the whole business aspect of not looking professional when you have the “sent from GMail on behalf of CostPerNews.com” in the header. Sure, I could go with Google Apps, but I’ve got 4 years of mail archived in my personal GMail account. Loa solves a huge problem there as well (and there’s a special plan for GMail users).
And that’s why I like Loa Power Tools. It’s a problem solving application for power email users that you don’t notice running in the background because it does what it needs to do quietly.
Just thought I’d plug the service (no, this is not a paid advertisement, I’m just a fan) because it’s an unsung hero of my daily work flow. Go read more and give it a shot if you need this sort of a solution (and who doesn’t with the ubiquity of wifi hotspots these days?)…
Tell me more about Loa PowerTools: “Loa PowerTools is a tiny utility that lets you send email from any internet connection anywhere. Once it is installed, you don’t have to change your life at all. You can use whatever email software you prefer: Outlook, Mac Mail, Thunderbird … it doesn’t matter, but Loa PowerTools will send your mail out through the Internet in a way that can’t be stopped by any but the most aggressive firewalls. And by ‘aggressive’ we mean firewalls in secure places where you wouldn’t expect to be able to have much Internet contact with the outside world.
It’s particularly useful for laptops. Without Loa PowerTools, when you travel from connection to connection, you never know what mail server to use to send mail. You often have to spend a lot of time fumbling around to find the address of an SMTP server that will let you connect. Even if you can find one that would let you connect, more and more often these days the network you use won’t allow any mail at all. The provider of the connection deliberately blocks all outward-bound mail. The detective work you have to do is exhausting and often fruitless! You never know from one trip to the next whether you will be able to send email when you are at your destination hotel, in a conference room or an airport lounge or using some other publicly available network. And as the number of malicious exploits around the Web increases, the problem is only getting worse: network operators are being forced to become more and more protective of their networks.”
Plus, they take PayPal. Can’t beat that. Tell ’em uncle Sam sent ya.
