If you learn about the internet and how it works as I do, by picking it up piecemeal as you go along, there are often huge gaps in your knowledge that you don’t realise. One has been revealed to me recently about email.
My business email has always been downloaded to my email client (Eudora or MS Outlook). I knew that there were some sorts of email that you viewed online, like Hotmail and Yahoo, but vaguely thought that they were somehow a different sort of email. In fact I didn’t really think much about it at all, other than the fact that some email accounts you downloaded and some you read online.
It is only after I started using my new webhosting company Ecowebhosting that I realised that *all* email goes to an online mail box where, presumably, it can be read. Whether or not you download it to your computer is really up to you and whether or not your ISP allows you access to the online box where it is stored.
I have to say that I am more than a bit aggrieved about this. There have been many times in the past 10 years or so when it would have been really convenient to view my email online. For example when we were staying in a castle in Northumberland and had to drive several miles down the road to where we could get a signal on my moblile phone, through which, connected to my laptop, my email was downloaded veeeeery very slowly. It would have been much easier, and considerably cheaper, to just view it online. I have had similar problems on other holidays.
Of course there is a way nowadays to view your email online, even if you have an IPS who won’t let you view online. You can do this through Googlemail.
If you go to the settings link at the top of the Googlemail screen, and then select import and accounts, you can instruct Googlemail to check your box every few minutes or so. If you ask it to, it will also leave the mail in your box to be dowloaded later to your email account.
I set this up initially so I could read my email via my mobile phone and take advantage of the Google spam protection (otherwise I found I was downloading ridiculous amounts of spam). However it was very useful indeed when I was on holiday.
I am seriously considering abandoning my computer email software altogether and just using Googlemail. The main thing that puts me off storing my email ‘in the cloud’ (presumably on a Google server somewhere in America), is fear of what might happen if the cloud bursts and all my online emails get lost.
What do you do? Do you think my worries about storing my emails online are misplaced? Were you aware that all email accounts could be accessed online?
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