Almost every week I receive emails like:

• How do I access my Incredimail email from my office or when travelling?
• How do I access Outlook Express email from my office or when travelling?

Because people access the email using one of these clients they assume that these clients are the source of their emails.

They are instead the final destination.

As an analogy to the standard postal service. A letter must go through many sorting offices from the originating post office to the final destination (your house/post office box).

The same is true with email. It starts its journey from the senders email client (outlook Express etc) and ends its journey in the recipients inbox of an email client like Outlook Express.

However unlike normal mail that gets delivered to your door with email you have to go and get it from the post office. This is one of the jobs of your email client.

In order for your email client to get your mail from your post office it needs to know where it is. This is part of the initial account setup.

Here is a screenshot showing this part of the setup for outlook Express but you will find most email clients have a similar setup screen.

  The incoming mail part of the setup is where you tell your email client the name of the server that has your post box ( or mailbox whichever term you prefer).

Of course just as a real Post office has thousands of post office boxes an email server has thousands of mailboxes and so you need to tell the client which mailbox to access. Just as you would normally open a physical box with a key for our mailbox we use a password.

Here is the screenshot from Outlook Express setup showing this part of the setup. The mailbox name is the account name.