The Otter's Study

Dial-Up Email! An Experiment in internet connectivity.

Before the UK POTS network swaps to VOIP based solution, I wanted to attempt to send an e-mail via a Dial Up internet connection. This is the story of how I attempted to do so, and why you can no longer send an e-mail via Dial Up (at least in the UK).

Firstly, I am very aware that I could have created my own Dial Up ISP at home with some cheap equipment and a bit of time. I could, but that is boring. Gravis (also known as Cathode Ray Dude online) shows the results of this, as well as how to do this on his website. It’s very cool and I would like to set this up myself now that this experiment failed. However, this requires me to get hold of some equipment I don’t really need, nor want to pay as much as people are asking for them. I wish the UK had a “RePC” that he has access to; alas we don’t and finding SIP ATA’s cheap here isn’t easy. 

The experiment I wanted to conduct was as follows:

1. Connect to a Dial Up ISP
2. Send an e-mail to the small group of people who I’d gathered together for this
3. Visit my website
4. Visit Gravis’ site (this was added as a bonus after part of this project failed).

How did I plan to achieve this? The biggest issue was finding a Dial Up ISP. There aren’t really any around any more, however I thought I’d found one. After some searching, I found a provider called “nippy”. Nippy are interesting, in that they were free to use, with the costs being covered by the fact they used a premium rate 0844 number. This would probably cost about 25p a minute, but hey it’s an experiment.

The next issue was finding a machine that could be used to Dial Up. I don’t have many computers with a Dial Up modem, but my Sony Vaio VGN-BX195VP fit the bill. It originally came with Windows XP Professional, but arrived in my hands running a version of Windows Embedded. That wouldn't fly. So my first attempt was to install the latest version of 32 bit Debian. I figured if I was taking this machine online, I probably wanted to have something newer than XP. Cut to 10 hours later, Debian didn't work (it wouldn't install GRUB correctly???) and I'm now looking at installing XP. So I install XP. I had to rescue the drivers from the Windows Embedded hard drive. I then slipstreamed the SATA drivers and XP SP2 onto my Windows XP Professional OEM disk with nLite in a Virtual Machine on my main computer (as it runs Kubuntu).

The next challenge was writing the new image to a USB key. This was difficult. Linux doesn’t really like making non-Linux boot USB’s. Unetbootin is supposed to be able to, but I had no luck. Furthermore, Windows XP doesn’t really understand what a USB key is (at least when you try to boot the setup from one). Rufus can make a Windows XP boot disk, but it only runs on Windows. I don’t have a Windows computer. No big deal, I thought, I’ll just pass the USB key though to my VM in VirtualBox and use Rufus in there. No dice. It said it wrote the key but when I plugged it into the Vaio, I got a big warning saying that it required a UEFI enabled computer from the old Ubuntu installer that previously occupied the disk. Well that didn’t work. Turns out VirtualBox doesn’t pass things through quite as you’d expect. Oh well. The actual solution was boot up that Windows Embedded disk and use Rufus on there to create the USB. That worked and about an hour later, XP is installed and all the other drivers (sound, video, fingerprint reader, modem, etc.) were installed.

Now to update the machine. I used Legacy Update (because Microsoft don't let XP machines update with them easily anymore). 24 hours later, XP is as up to date as it can possibly be. I activated using the phone service, as this still works. This is also when I decided to add Gravis’ site to my list of things to try, as his site doesn’t require HTTPS and would work on Internet Explorer 8. I would turn off HTTPS on this site, but GitHub Pages require that you force HTTPS if you don’t have a domain set up (something I don’t really feel like doing).

Now for the email client. I was going to use Outlook from Office XP. I have a legit copy and it seemed fitting. So I install Office XP and activate it in the same way that I activated the main OS. All was well. I then create an app password for it with my email provider and go to set it up. But it doesn't authenticate. It turns out Office XP's Outlook doesn't support the SSL that my provider requires, so I had to find an alternative. Thunderbird 59 to the rescue! It's the last version of Thunderbird to work with Windows XP and it does just that - it works. It's from 2018 and satisfies my provider’s SSL requirements and that's all I needed.

Now to send the e-mail. I precomposed it (it was mostly the same as the above, with a few minor things tweaked), included a 640x480 photograph as an extra and now came time to send it. I add a Nippy Dial Up connection as per the instructions on their website, click on the connect button and... nothing. Well, not nothing. I got a recording.

“The service is closed.”

RINGING TONE

“Sorry there is no reply” (looping)

It would appear that Nippy no longer exists, at least not at that number. I did some searching and couldn’t find an (easy to use) UK Dial Up provider. I do wonder how many people this has affected. We know, for example, that in the United States, Dial Up is still in somewhat common use, at least in the countryside. Some poorly served communities use it, as do some Amish communities. The Amish communities are quite interesting, as many do not allow general internet access, instead using computers running a modified copy of GeoWorks, allowing for e-mail and basic word processing, but not much more.

For those who were taking part in the experiment, I did end up sending them the email, with a bit of extra detail about how Nippy no longer works. I sent the e-mail using my 3g/4g travel modem, as it’s as close to Dial Up as we can get to in 2024, at least here in the UK.

It’s a real shame that Dial Up no longer works in the UK. I do wonder if some remote communities suffer as a result. Maybe they’ve switched to using DSL, Satellite or even 3g/4g. Who knows? Either way I hope they still have access to the Internet.

If you want to get the Dial Up experience, without the fuss, you can use FireFox to simulate it. If you go into the Developer Tools, under the “Network Tab” you can throttle the connection to “GPRS”, which is about the same speed as a 56k Dial Up connection. Here are a couple of websites loading up with the throttling enabled, to give an idea how slow a Dial Up connection really is. What’s very notable is how long the BBC News page takes to load. I eventually stopped loading it and gave up, after over two minutes of waiting. You do wonder if websites are a little bit too big now. That BBC News homepage is a grand total of 3.4 megabytes of data. My homepage is 14.6 kilobytes (0.0146 megabytes); Gravis’ is 16.8 kilobytes (0.0168 megabytes). Take from this what you will.