Access Email From Another Location/Computer
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 Basics
To 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:
-
Mail placed into postal system by sender.
-
Mail transferred between sorting offices.
-
Mail delivered to the Local post office of recipient and placed in his post
office box.
-
Receiver goes to Post office opens post box and takes mail home.
-
Receiver sits at home and reads mail.
Email:
-
Mail placed into email system by sender (using email client)
-
Mail transferred between email servers.
-
Mail delivered to the recipient's email provider's server and placed in his mailbox.
-
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).
-
Receiver reads email that is now stored on his local PC.
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.
Butyou can tell the email client to leave a copy of the messages on the email
server, and then you 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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