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Webmail

Arguably email communication is as important as the world wide web even though it is the web that gets most of the attention. To many people, how they access their mail is determined by the service they use and they may either not have been given choices or the choices were meaningless at the time.

There are three main ways to access email: POP3, IMAP and Webmail. The first two are both “protocols” and require a program (such as MS Outlook, or Apple Mail) running on your local computer to access the messages.

With POP3 (usually abbroeviated to just POP which stands for Post Office Protocol) the server somewhere out on the internet acts as a big “in box”. All mail sent to you goes into the POP mailbox. Your mail program goes to this mailbox to see if you have new messages periodically or when you click a button to check mail.

When there are new messages these are copied to the local computer and you can then put them in folders which again are located on the local computer. The message in the POP mailbox can then be deleted but they are often left on the server for longer and this allows you to check the mailbox from a different computer. But this can get messy and confusing as some messages would end up on one computer and not the other and you would have trouble finding things.

IMAP (which stands for Internet Message Access Protocol) is very similar to POP3 but has the advantage that it can organise messages into folders on the server. This means that you could access your mail from different computers and messages would always be available from both locations and any organisation of messages performed in one location would be reflected in the other. You still have the option of copying messages to the local computer for longer term archiving.

Webmail allows mail to be read on a web page through a web browser. Sometimes webmail is the only means of accessing a mailbox account (as with Hotmail or Yahoo mail) and sometimes it is an extra way of accessing a POP3 or IMAP mailbox.

Webmail has traditionally been the poor cousin of email programs running on local computers. However newer webmail programs are beginning to rival desktop applications and webmail offers some inherent advantages anyway. Webmail can be accessed from any web browser on any computer which is useful when travelling or simply not at your normal computer.

We can arrange your email so that you can access it in any of the above ways and create a solution that makes it easy for you to access and manage your email as efficiently as possible.

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