Correct on both counts.

Another option is Yahoo Mobile email, which does support alerts.
<http://mobile.yahoo.com/mobilemail>

   Of course it's easy enough to set up a background task on a computer
to periodically check if you have email and send you an alert text msg
if so.

Again, thanks.

My conclusion from all this is that if a person wants to:
1. Have the OPTION of receiving wanted emails via his/her cell phone,
AND
2. Also have the option of receiving these same wanted emails via
his/her computer (either when his/her cell phone is not available, or
to avoid any fees associated with receiving these wanted emails),
AND
3. Does not want to ever have to pay for any incoming UNwanted emails
to his/her cell phone...

...then the solution would be to:

1. Disable MMS email messaging, because it goes directly to the phone
and you are therefore charged for ALL incoming MMS emails, wanted or
not,
AND
2. Use the Cingular Media, Google, Yahoo, etc. web-based email, and
then only access this email via cell phone when you really need to,
AND
3. If you need to always be notified immediately of all incoming
emails, then set up your web-based email to alert you on your cell
phone when any emails come in, OR...if you do not need immediate
notification, then instead just tell your contacts to call you on your
cell phone when their business with you or their email to you is
urgent.

The only scenario I can think of where the above might NOT be the best
plan would if the ratio of urgent to non-urgent emails per day for a
user was so high that the cost of the alerts plus the WAP access to
fetch the emails would exceed the cost of simply having them all
arrive via MMS (where no additional alert is necessary)...but it would
seem that this ratio would have to be VERY high in order offset the
incurred charges for all of the NON-urgent MMS emails received. It
would seem that once a person started disclosing their MMS email
address to their contacts, their MMS email inbox would then start to
look like their POP3 or web-based email box, complete with SPAM,
unwanted forwarded jokes from friends, etc., and to "add insult to
injury", they would be charged for all of these emails.

And another disadvantage of using the MMS email (if I understand it
correctly...see below) would be that you would have to sacrifice
having a "backup" copy of each email received (with web-based email
the emails would exist on the server until you deleted them), so that
if you broke or lost your cell phone, you would also lose any MMS
emails that it currently contained. This doesn't happen every day,
but if the email was an order or inquiry from a customer that doesn't
get processed because the email disappeared along with your cell
phone, it would only take one event like this to cost a user a lot of
money and/or grief.

The validity of the last paragraph, above, depends upon the answer to
this question:
I think that I read in here somewhere that once MMS emails are sent to
your cell phone, they no longer exist anywhere but inside of your cell
phone at that point. If true...then if you break or lose your phone
while it still has unread MMS email messages in it, are those emails
not then lost forever (whereas the web-based emails would still exist
on their servers)?
OR do I have the facts wrong, and you have to actually OPEN or DELETE
the MMS emails on your cell phone before Cingular's copy is deleted.
Does Cingular's copy disappear as soon as the MMS email is
successfully RECIEVED by your phone, or does it require action by the
cell phone owner (opening the MMS email or actively deleting it)
before Cingular's copy is deleted?

Jerry