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:

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.