After spending the better part of a Wednesday 35,000 feet over the Atlantic Ocean, you know that you'll have some mission-critical email waiting for you when you land in Frankfurt. Given Germany's notoriously vexing (to Americans) phone system, it's unlikely that the hotel's Internet hookup will embrace your laptop -- that is, if you had bothered to bring a laptop. But you didn't bring one, and for someone who barely knows enough German to order a bratwurst, you're remarkably unconcerned. You realize that even if most of the text on the hotel's computer is Greek to you, your email is just a few clicks away -- and it's all in English: You can access it through any Web browser. Let the Euro dealing begin.

Why do we do it? Why do we shoulder a bag jammed with a laptop and its accoutrements when its main (and sometimes only) purpose is to get your email? Fortunately, a number of Web sites can take that weight off your shoulders by letting you send and receive email from any computer with an Internet link. Better still: Most of them are free of charge.

Who offers such a deal? Web portals such as Yahoo! and Lycos do. So do online services like America Online (AOL Mail on the Web) and MSN (Hotmail). Just find a browser, and one of these sites can give you access to your inbox, outbox, sent-mail box, and address book, since those things are all handled via the Web site. Web email services require only a name and a password; a special email program, such as Outlook or Eudora, isn't necessary. By having company email forwarded to your "traveling" address (yourname@yahoo.com, for example), you can keep up with mail even when you leave your hardware behind.

Yahoo! Mail is one of the more convenient and comprehensive of these Web mail services. It has all of the basics: You can read and compose mail from your Yahoo! account and check your company's mail server for messages sent to your regular business email address. (Don't worry if you have more than one address: Yahoo! Mail can check several accounts.) The service lets you keep a complete address book online, and you can search your email by key phrase.

Yahoo! Mail also has some of the perks that you'll find in corporate email programs. For example, you can tell Yahoo! to add a custom signature to every message or have it automatically reply to incoming email. ("I'm out of the office today ...") You can have Yahoo! sort your mail into designated folders, and you can filter or block unwanted mail. You can even have faxes and voice-mail messages forwarded to your email account.

But free email doesn't mean that you get a free lunch. The amount of email that you can keep online is rationed (a 3-MB limit is typical), and there are usually limits on the size of attached files that you can send or receive. Some services let you expand your mail flow (Yahoo! Mail will give you a 20-MB mailbox for about $20 a year), but many do not. Still, most of these constraints are tolerable -- and they're a small price to pay for cutting the email cord.

Admittedly, severing the laptop cord altogether is a tougher challenge. The Web may be all around you, but it may not be in all of the places that you need it to be -- airports, hotels, clients' offices -- or it may not be there when you need it, or it may not give you access to all of the programs and files that you need to make it work. Not yet, at least. But clearly, the Web can serve as a kind of omnipresent adjunct office -- one that will continue to become better staffed and more efficient, and one that can lighten your load as you go.

Coordinates: Free (for basic 3-MB service), or $20 per year (for expanded 20-MB service). Yahoo! Mail (www.yahoo.com)

Chris O'Malley (omalleyc@aol.com) also covers personal technology for "Men's Journal" and "Popular Science."

Action Item: Global Access

Not getting a dial tone in Denmark? If you had dialed into the Global Road Warrior site before leaving the States, you might have avoided such connection hassles. This free resource offers local access numbers for logging onto the Web, and it tells you how to get the right phone-jack adapters for the countries on your itinerary. It even lists business centers and computer-rental services for those who travel without a laptop. International travel is a battle, and this is a weapon to keep in your digital arsenal.

Coordinates: Global Road Warrior, www.globalroadwarrior.com