My son in law will be visiting Canberra from Townsville. He uses a PC and his provider is BigPond. My machine is an Apple and my provider is Spirit. Can he access his email from my machine - if so, what steps must he take? Can he send emails from my machine or should he somehow set up a separate account? I dialed BigPond and they told me something about dialing 6217 0700 which I gather is connected to a Modem. I dialed through a communications document (using Claris) which said Welcome to BigPond Enter name, Enter Password, Received IP address is 139.134.17.225, MTU is 1524, Then No carrier. Can you interpret this for me?

This can be done but you are approaching it the wrong way. You don’t use a Communications document in a program like Claris Works, that is only to dial into a remote computer and remotely use it (eg. like a Bulletin Board System/BBS). You cannot use this to dial into an ISP. To do this you use a program like FreePPP (which I assume you already have). This program sends specific commands to the remote system telling it that you in fact do want to log onto the internet and that your username and password are correct. This is not necessary though. Your son in law can receive his email through your internet service providers (ISP) account. The way to do this is open your email client, go into the options or preferences (depending on what software you use), and change the mail servers POP3 and STMP to your sons ISP ones and enter in his login and password as well. This can be a very complex operation to carry out especially for novices. If you are unsure on how to do this, ring up BigPond and ask them how to change the settings.