THE BUREAU HAS MOVED!!!

PostPet is a super user friendly e-mail program... so friendly, it sends you e-mail greetings and writes to you in a secret diary!

Your PostPet lives in a little room in your computer, and you have to feed it, wash it, clean away its mess, and occasionally scold it (by clicking on it) just like a tamagotchi (or other virtual pet)!  The main difference between PostPet and regular Desktop Virtual Pets, though, is that it can leave its "room" to hand-deliver e-mails to another friend with PostPet! While at someone else's PostPet Room, your pet can play with the other person's Pet, fight with it, eat its food, or maybe even fall in love!   It writes you a little diary entry while it's away, and on its way home may even pick up little "treasures" like a piece of rainbow, or a magic pot!

As your pet matures, its intelligence, looks, level of happiness, etc, are affected by how you treat it, as well as how your friends treat it.   For example, if you send your pet out to a friend's "room" to play, and that "friend" slaps your pet, the pet could be very hurt, or grow up emotionally scarred as a result!

(Editor's note: This assumes the pet sticks around long enough to actually get slapped. In my experience, the PostPets only stick around for a minute or two when delivering mail... giving you little time to interact with them beyond checking their stats and maybe feeding them.)

If the pet grows to like your friends and their PostPets, it may start sending e-mails to them on its own!

Other stuff:

• Occasionally, little "guests" appear in the window of the "room", like an angel or a duck. I have no idea what these guests do, other than look cute.

• Supposedly only certain guests can show up in certain "rooms" (there are 4 basic room decors to choose from, which you can change as you see fit... the Cat room [modern Japanese], the Bunny room [Rabbit Hutch], the Bear Room [modern Western with wood panel floor] and the Tortoise Room [out of doors].

• You can download new snacks for your pet whenever the reserves get low, or whenever something new becomes available.

• The snacks for June are mangoes and nasi lemak (some sort of fried rice wrapped in banyan leaf).

PostPet can be a bit of a challenge to set up, but once it's correctly set up and configured, it's a delightful e-mail program, and charming virtual pet!

(Editor's note: I may be biased in that I spent a frustrating year-and-a-half using Web e-mail only, because my sister had hijacked the family account as well as the Eudora Lite and Eudora Pro programs on our computer. In that sense, PostPet was a g*dsend... the first e-mail program that actually lets me compose stuff OFFLINE.... *happy sigh*)

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Right now, a time-limited Beta version for WIN95 is available at

The Sony Singapore Homepage
It lasts for 180 days (unlike the Japanese trial versions for Win and Mac, which only last 30 days).

PostPet is supposed to come out as a full CD later this year, in November or so. It is already available in normal, Deluxe, and (later this summer) PostPet 2 (with all new characters: Sneak Preview here!) versions for Japanese Windows 95 and Japanese Macs... in Japan only, of course ;D

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The general requirements, as stated on the Official Sony PostPet Page are:

You also need an e-mail account that is compatible with POP3 and SMTP e-mail programs.

If you already have such an account, then be sure to find out what the pop3 and smtp settings are... you'll need this info when setting up your PostPet!

If you don't have such an account, or aren't sure if you do, you can get several FREE POP3 e-mail accounts on the web!

Be warned... after doing a search on "free +e-mail +POP", and after checking out some of the links on a free e-mail directory, I've found that a lot of places claiming to be POP3 compatible really mean to say:
"We'll let you use PostOfficeProtocol, or POP, to download all your messages from other accounts, into your account with us, so that you'll ONLY use our service, and we'll make a lot of money from all those advertisers eager to bombard our captive audience."

Here, however, is a brief list of GENUINELY free POP3 e-mail accounts. (Most of them I am already registered at, under various names :D So they appear to work.) You will need to go on-line to register for them :D but once they are set up, within an hour or so they should be ready for use as PostPet accounts. Have fun! (As I add more service providers, etc, I will add them to the top of the list. Other ones will be bumped down towards the bottom. You have been warned!)

I hope the info at the Mail Center helps somewhat. If you need more info, feel free to e-mail me or ICQ me!

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align="center"> PostPet is still a fairly new phenomenon... hopefully, we won't have nearly as many PostPet Pages crashing and burning as we did with Tamagotchi Pages! Here are a list of my favourite PostPet pages! The snack-related ones are at the BURP Snack Page! Enjoy!

Bon-Bon's Page
A charming page, with a convenient on-line indicator! :)

Our Bear and Cat
A beatiful PostPet page, and one of my current faves! Don't forget to visit the Souvenir Shop on the way out!

PostPet Page A la Mazurka
One of my dearest online pals, Mazurka, has designed a great PostPet page! Come take a look!

Tomoko's SilverMoon page
... a good source of general PostPet info! If your browser can handle Japanese, visit her main pages too!

Factory Mana
This page has Original PostPet Vegetarian Snacks, a shareware v-pet program, and more!

PostPet Fan
When you're downloading these "rooms", be sure to save or unzip them into the "plug-ins" folder of your postpet directory. Also be aware that sometimes your pet can get "stuck" in the doorways, and require a washing to break free.
I downloaded the Star Trek themed room... My sister picked the "kitchen" for her cat. Many amusing Japanese visual in-jokes are there, for the Asiaphiles among you!

Pet's Smileage Club
From the makers of AGIT... a charming little page, and further support for my theory that everyone should become multilingual, or bilingual at the very least... :)

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Stop Direct-Mail (SPAM) PostPets!

STOP DM! is a movement going on in the Japanese Internet Community (it may be elsewhere as well, but so far I only know of it through Japanese websites :P)

Basically, PostPet lovers everywhere are becoming increasingly concerned about the number of people who "abuse" their PostPets... not by hitting them or starving them, but by treating them like a "toy" and randomly spamming total strangers in an effort to jack up the number of messages that the PostPet has carried. The STOP DM! (Direct Mail) Campaign wants PostPetPals everywhere to treat PostPet like a friend, not a slave... to remember that PostPet is COMMUNICATION software, created so that people all over the world can share ideas and express feelings, using a cute and user friendly interface.

Personally, I'm not sure where I stand on this. Certainly, SPAMMING is in very bad taste, no matter what form it comes in... But I also think that when a program is as cute as PostPet is, it's very hard to resist sending your pet out on increasingly trivial errands (eg. "Look at what Kaylee wrote in her diary!"-type messages).

My personal PostPet Etiquette Guidelines go something like this:

• Always e-mail or ICQ or Instant Message the person first, to ask if it's okay if you send over the PostPet.

  After all, if they're busy when you send the pet over, they may not be able to get to it for a while!

• Try to have some sort of meaningful content.

  And by meaningful, I don't mean some big treatise on the human condition, or an essay on Shakespear; I mean something that stimulates discussion, or increases communication. Even if all you write is "This is [Insert name of pet]'s Diary entry, if that provokes discussion (eg. "Why the heck did she write something like that?" "I think that your pet has a crush on mine" etc.) that is, In My Opinion, Meaningful.

• Always have a candy or snack out for an incoming guest.

  This didn't start out as an etiquette thing... the first time, I had set out a snack for Killer the Bunny who was "slightly hungry", when someone's pet barged in and ate it :)

  Although initially horrified, I grew to enjoy the feeding of someone else's cute pet, and so it's become a habit to leave out a sweet on the table.

• Pat the Cat.

  Or Bear, or Turtle, Or Bunny, or whatever the pet is. Usually, if you pay more attention to the pet, the pet has more to write about in their diary... leading, of course, to more Meaningful PostPet Mails ;D

• Have fun.

  The whole point of PostPet is to make communication fun, and to make new friends. So if you see someone's name on a PostPet Pal Directory, try sending some preliminary e-mails. Look for common ground. Let your Pets get to know each other... after all, they want friends, too!

Send me PostPet mail HERE!

Send me normal e-mail at turquoiseangel@hotmail.com!
(This is my regular e-mail address. Feel free to drop me a line! ...As long as it's not too long. D@rned Hotmail has a limited on how many e-mails you can have in your account at once :()

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