Email Mailboxes

If you have just a single email address, you may never have had to to think about how email gets from the sender to your email client.

[DEFINITION: email client: the program you use to view emails. For most people, it's Microsoft Outlook]

It feels like a two step process:

• The sender sends the email
• You receive the email

But there are at least three steps to the process:

• The sender sends the email
• The email is delivered to a web-based mailbox
• The email is retrieved from the web-based mailbox by your email client

A world of possibilities

Once you become aware of the existance of the web-based mailbox, you begin to see the flexibility it can offer, including:

• The ability to pick up email from multiple locations
• The ability to have more than one person collect the same emails

Checking email from more than one location

The mailbox may be accessed from more than one place. Some of the possibilities are:

• At home via Outlook
• On the train via a mobile phone
• At the office via webmail

The key "enabler" for this is to make sure that each of the email clients that access the mailbox are set to leave emails in the mailbox for period of time (say 30 days).

Have more than one person check the same mailbox

Once you realise that its possible to pick up the same email from multiple locations, it's a small step to start thinking about different people collecting the same emails.

For personal emails, this is usually a bad idea. But for organisations, this can be extremely useful.