Home › Forums › Communications ›

Remote access to mail program

Submitted by Julia Perkins on November 29, 2005 - 11:55am.

At my organization most of us use Apple Mail to organize and manage our email. However when we are out and about, those of us who don't have laptops have to access our email through our web-based email which is really sloppy and doesn't filter junk mail. The web-based mail also doesn't have the old mail that we've sent or received, or the folders we've organized on our computers.

Is there anyway to remotely access our mail program?

‹ Anybody have suggestions about mass emailing? E-Newsletters ›

Two possible solutions

Submitted by arif on December 8, 2005 - 1:51pm.

Julia - there's two ways to do email - POP and IMAP.

POP stands for Post Office Protocol (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Post_Office_Protocol). The way it works is this: your email is delivered to your mail server - at your ISP or website, and from there, your mail program, in your case Apple's Mail, downloads your mail and stores it on your computer, removing it from the server.

The other way to access your mail is via IMAP - Internet Message Access Protocol (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IMAP). The way IMAP works is that all your mail is stored on your mail server - again at your ISP or webhost. Your mail program - either Apple Mail or webmail essentially synchronizes itself with the mail stored on your mail server. Your desktop program can optionally cache messages for offline viewing.

The advantage of IMAP is that when you check email via webmail, all your mail is there. The downside is that this obviously takes more room on the server which means that your ISP or web host charges you more.

One other option which is becoming more popular is to forward a copy of all your mail to a webmail program with a lot of storage. GMail - Google's mail service is one of the more popular choices since it was the first to offer mutli-gigabyte storage limits, but other providers have changed their offerings to match or beat Google's storage limit so it's worth shopping around. The way this option works is that through your ISP or web host - whoever handles your email - you deliver and forward all mail that comes to any given address, so for example: I tell my mail host that I want email sent to arif@progressivetech.org to be delivered to a mailbox that I can access through POP, but I also want all that mail forwarded to arifptp@gmail.com.

Then, when I'm on the road and without my laptop, I can access Gmail and see all my old email as well as any new messages I've received. If you choose this option, there's one important feature to look for - the ability to set a custom "from" address so that your mail is coming from your primary email address, not the whatever@gmail.com address. Gmail does this, and I think Yahoo! offers it as a for-fee option.

Hope that helps.