You're expecting an important personal email, and you're at
work. So how do you access your email from another location like
your office? In fact, one of the most common questions I get
asked is: How do I access my outlook express email (IncrediMail
email) from work?
Understanding Email BasicsTo understand how you go about this, you first need to
understand the basics of email. Email functions, in fact, very
much like the normal mail system. The process for both standard
physical mail and email are:
Physical Mail:1. Mail is placed into postal system by sender.
2. Mail is transferred between sorting offices.
3. Mail is delivered to the Local post office of recipient and
placed in his post office box.
4. Receiver goes to Post office opens post box and takes mail
home.
5. Receiver sits at home and reads mail.
Email:1. Mail is placed into email system by sender (using email
client) 2. Mail is transferred between email servers.
3. Mail is delivered to the recipient's email provider's server
and placed in his mailbox.
4. The Email client (e.g. outlook express) connects to server
and transfers email from the email server to the local client
and deletes it from server (default behaviour).
5. The Receiver reads email that is now stored on his local PC.
See
Mailbox and mailbox locations for more details.
Normally you would go to the post office and collect your mail
and bring it back home. The mail would now be stored in your
house. But you could go to your post box read your mail and then
put it back in the post box (i.e. not take them with you).
If you did that then, some else could then come at a later time
and read the same mail. This we can also do in the email world.
In the email world most email clients use a protocol called POP3
to get the email from the local email server and move it to your
mailbox on your local machine. Basically this is the same
behaviour as in the physical mail.
But we can tell the email client to leave a copy of the messages
on the email server, and so we can then access the same email
again from another location using another email client.
So it is possible to access your email from multiple locations
by simply leaving a copy of your email on the email server.
Leaving Email on the email server has a number of advantages.
This I will discuss in
Leaving Email on the Internet.
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