Re picking sending and receiving email when you are on the move from your laptop.
You have a number of options (I am assuming hotel doesn't have ADSL connection):-
1. Assuming your laptop has a modem, then connect your modem to the telephone socket in your room and dial-up your ISP. This can be expensive because hotels normally charge a premium rate for dialling from your room. If you're paying normal BT rates then dial-up is the cheap but it is also very slow (typically achieve around 45 kilobits per second).
2. Some of the big hotel chains, such as Marriots, have in premise WiFi Networks. This means that all you need is a Wi-Fi 802.11 wireless networking card in your laptop to access the internet. These start at about £20 for a PCMCIA card which is a format that fits in most laptops. You don't say in your email where your mail server is so I can't elaborate on how to get to your mail server once you are on the internet.
Aswell as hotels, airports, Starbucks and Costa coffee houses also operate such WiFi hotspots. This method is between about 250 and and 1200 times faster than dial-up modem. The tariffs charged by the operators vary but for example Starbucks charges start at about £5.00 for 60 minutes. There are security issues about using public WiFi hotspots which is too big a subject to discuss here but if you are sending and receiving confidential data you need to take certain security measures to ensure that your data is encrypted and is not accessible to other users on the network.
3. I guess the one that you are really interested in is mobile communications i.e. GSM or GPRS communications using the same technology as your mobile phone uses. You have two options in this area.
i) use GSM communications. This is slow (9600 bps - slower than your dial-up modem). All you need is a mobile phone and a current GSM (voice) contract with one of the operators. Depending on you laptop and your mobile phone, your laptop can use your mobile phone to dial-up over GSM but your laptop needs to communicate with your phone in one of 3 ways, 1. Infrared 2. Bluetooth or 3. dedicated data cable. The disadvantage of Infrared is that it is line of sight i.e. you have to line up the infrared port on your laptop with the infrared port on your mobile phone. Infrared also only has a range of about 1 metre. Bluetooth is not line of sight and has a range of about 10 metres although it is slower than infrared.
I find Bluetooth a lot easier to use.
Rather than using your mobile phone, you can insert a GSM mobile data card directly into your PC - again these are available in PCMCIA or CF (Compact flash) format. They start around £150 but if you buy one with a contract with one of the operators, the price is reduced and in many cases the hardware is free.
When you are connected over GSM, you pay for the time you are connected and pay the same rate that you do for you mobile voice calls.
ii) use GPRS communications. This is faster than GSM but slower than dial-up. Depite what is quoted, typical data speeds in the UK are significantly less than what is technically possible over GPRS and expect to achieve download speeds between 13kbps and 22kbps depending on the operator, time of day and location. Upload speeds are about the same as GSM. With GPRS you don't have such a long connection time as you do when you are using GSM. As with GSM, you can use a GPRS capable mobile phone (most are) and connect to it from your laptop via IR, Bluetooth or data cable. Or again you can get a dedicated GPRS data card in PCMCIA or Compact Flash format. Once you have got a GPRS enabled device, all you need is to enable your SIM for GPRS (ring your operator). Over GPRS you pay for the data transferred and not for the time that you are connected. However - BIG WARNING - GPRS pricess are still an exorbitant rip-off in the UK, especially if you don'y buy a GPRS data tariff. For example, if you are on say a Vodafone 100 plan and you ask for GPRS to be enabled, you will pay over £7 !! for each Megabyte of data transferred (I think you could have a GSM call open for about 50 minutes at that price). Therefore, if you are going to use GPRS be sure to buy a GPRS tariff from your operator but these are also expensive - Orange tend to be cheapest. As an example Vodafone GPRS plans start at about £12 per month for 5 MB of inclusive data. Of course, it is IMPOSSIBLE to know exactly how much data you are paying for when you are reading emails, browsing the internet etc but it will be more than you expect. If you are browsing the internet, it won't take very long before you have used 1MB of data. My advice would be to install something like Running Voice on your laptop so you know exactly how much data you are paying for.
Don't forget when using GPRS or GSM comms, you will experience the same problems you experience when making mobile phone calls i.e. loss of signal, reduced bandwidth, no coverage etc.
This is all a bit rushed and there are options such as Orange HCSD and 3G that I have not covered. If you are going to buy GSM/GPRS hardware then there is some further info I can give you.
After all that, if you really only want to pick up and send emails when you are away from the office, the way I would do it is to find an Internet Cafe and access my email via Webmail - cheap, reliable and quick. If you use POP3 email but your ISP does not provide webmail then open a Yahoo or MSN Hotmail mail account as these let you pick up email from your POP3 mail server anyway.
Hope that is useful.
Thanks a bunch - you useless lot 
