[The benefit is that your email is on your machine and you can do with it what you will. You should be doing that for more than just your email anyway, so this shouldn’t be an extra step. Once downloaded, the email resides only on your machine.īecause it’s on your machine, you’ll need to make sure that you’re backing up properly so as not to lose everything should your hard disk die. With a PC email program configured to use the POP3 protocol, you actually move your email from the server to your own PC when you download your email: Also, if you lose access to your account, you lose access to everything in it, perhaps forever in the case of most free accounts. The downsides are that it requires an active internet connection to read your email and you’re subject to the speed of that connection.
The convenience is that you can access it from any computer at any time as long as you can connect to the internet and log in to your account. Your inbox, folders, and whatever else that you choose to keep as part of your email, including perhaps even your contacts, is all kept on that server. The email never leaves the server and remains stored there. Your email remains on the email provider’s mail server and is not downloaded to your machine 2. The key is that other than providing the browser that you use to access your email, your PC is not involved. To read your Yahoo! mail, you visit, and so on. Reading your email is really just like reading any other web page on the internet, except that you must log in to be identified. For example, to read your Gmail, you go to (or ). Web-based email is any email that you read using your web browser. So, what happens when you read your email?Īs my most common response goes, it depends. When you get your email, that’s where it comes from. Email that is destined for you is collected on a server that’s run by your email provider. If your email address is provided by your ISP, then it’s their server. If your email address is then that mail server is run by the folks at Microsoft who own Hotmail. When they send you email, it is placed in a central location provided by your email service provider ( ESP). Clearing up some of that should help you understand what’s happening here, and also help you decide how you want to handle it.Įmail comes from everywhere: from all of your correspondents and potentially from people all over the globe. There are a lot of misunderstandings of exactly what email is, where it lives, and what it means to have an email address.
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