POP3 email accounts

18 March 2009

When buying a new domain name you can usually setup email accounts within the control panel.

If you can't then it may be that this is an extra that you will need to pay for, or go back to the host for.

POP3 email accounts work as follows:

  • An email comes into the email server
  • An email client such as Microsoft Outlook or Thunderbird downloads the email to your local computer
  • The email is removed from the remote server

And so the cycle continues every time a new email comes in.

To setup an email client application you will need the following details:

  • Your email address
  • The username (often this is the email address again)
  • The password
  • The POP3/SMTP server address (often mail.domain-name.com)

And then other options like whether the server requires authentication, etc.

There is also usually an option in your email client application as to how long you leave the email on the remote server.

Two options are:

Download the email to the local computer and delete from the remote

The email will now be on your local computer and this will be the only copy of the email. If deleted from this computer then it will be gone!

Leave the email on the remote server for a few days

This is good for backup reasons, as if your computer crashes then you will still have a copy of the email on the remote server.

On the other hand if you're receiving emails from one email address on multiple computers then you are likely to end up with duplicates as each email client will want to download it for themselves as they see it as being a new email. This will result in having the same email downloaded to multiple email clients.

If you want to use more than one computer to view your emails on then a good option will be to download all emails onto an external hard drive such as a USB memory stick so that you can download all the emails to the same place, avoid duplicates and be able to access your emails from anywhere.

If you're against spending money on buying Microsoft Outlook then there's a free option, from the same people who bought us Firefox, called Thunderbird.

Thunderbird can be configured just like Microsoft Outlook and can also import email accounts and other settings from your Microsoft Outlook configuration files.

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