Congratulations on your decision to join the Peace Corps! The Peace Corps
mission is as relevant today as it was 45 years ago and we salute your contribution
towards the promotion of peace and cultural exchange. Success in your upcoming
assignment and we hope this service helps make your preparations easier.
We offer a simple, low-cost communication service to help you stay in touch with friends and family back in the States. For our low fee, we offer email, blog and photo management - all the basic tools you need.
This site is under development, so things will be changing over the next few
months. If you have an interest in purchasing the service or have ideas, please
contact the webmaster.
Why use this service instead of the free services? Good question.
Features you will find useful:
- No advertisements associated with you email
- Your Peace Corp related email is separate from your other email
- Access your email by webmail or with client software like Thunderbird or
Outlook, or forward to you favorite webmail account - you have full control
If you selected the Email & Blog Acct
- Integrated Blog and Picture management
- Access to your blog with a URL based on your userid and country code; userid.cc.pcvol.com
When this service was first envisioned, many of the free email services did not allow access to email except by webmail. By using a client email system like Outlook and Thunderbird, you have more options for reading and writing your email. If you use Thunderbird, you can load Thunderbird portable to a flash drive, run it at the internet cafe, download your emails and then at home, load them on your computer. This reduces the time you must sit at the internet cafe and can save you some money. And most PC volunteers like to stretch their funds.
You can use free email, free blogging and free photo management, but they are not linked together well. This offering allows your visitor to link to pictures from your blog - only one URL to know.
If you prefer an external photo gallery, changing the link on your blog is as simple as entering the URL in the setup option.
Why the price is so low and other things you should know. Full disclosure
.
For the basic plan, it works out to about 50 cents per month. This fee does
not cover the cost of providing this service, but we believe the service is
needed and useful and want to support volunteers in the field. We ask for you
patience when you think we are a bit slow in responding.
We use standard products, WordPress for the blog and Gallery2 for photo management.
You can find a lot of help on the web for these tools and most questions
can be resolved by researching your question with your favorite search tool.
As you search the site, you will notice, email is the only contact. We wish we could offer more support, but at this time, email is the best way to contact us.
Finally, we will make every attempt to resolve your problems as we understand the difficulty of working in remote areas. We also believe these tools are stable and well supported on the internet, so your problems will be limited.
