Unravel the web of e-mail options
By Lou Dolinar
Newsday

Looking for a better way to manage your e-mail? If you haven’t thought about it in a while, this isn’t a bad time to reconsider your options.
       For most folks, the overwhelming problem with e-mail is the disconnect between personal and business accounts. Lots of things that used to be simple aren’t.
       I remember the good old days when I could configure my copy of Outlook Express at home to retrieve mail from the same Newsday mail server as my copy of Outlook Express at the office. I set up the two copies of the program to leave a copy of all mail on the server for a week. Home and office e-mail were perfectly synchronized, as were my address books.
       That’s rarely possible today. Policies vary widely among businesses but in general, corporate America has been hardening up its defenses against spyware, viruses and spam. As part of this, some companies now block you from connecting to and downloading office e-mail from your home system; others block access to external mail systems, for example, the one at your home broadband provider. The standard workaround has been Yahoo or similar Web-based e-mail, which generally can get around corporate firewalls.
       Working with multiple mail systems leads to another set of problems, however: Your address books and mailboxes aren’t the same at home, in the office and on the road.
       You can often streamline the procedure, and Yahoo, although popular, isn’t necessarily the best choice for a Web-based mail.
       A fair number of companies have quietly put in place Web-based mail systems as auxiliaries to their main POP (post office protocol) accounts, the idea being that you can download mail directly on your office machine, or alternately browse it from the Web while you’re on the road. Corporate communications being what they are, you may well have access to this feature and not know about it. Verizon and Optimum Online also do a pretty good job of hiding their respective Web mail systems, which are available to all their usual broadband customers who use standard POP accounts.
       Google’s free Gmail service opens similar possibilities. Unlike Yahoo, it is the only free service I know of that, though primarily Web-based, also allows you to connect and download mail via a standard POP client such as Outlook Express.
       AOL has also cleaned up its act, mailwise. Once highly proprietary, it now can be accessed with any standard e-mail program. So you have three options with AOL: Web-based e-mail, your regular AOL client software, and any e-mail client software, including Outlook and Outlook Express.
       Another potential tool in your e-mail arsenal is the Thunderbird e-mail program. I wrote about a version of this (at www.portableapps .com) that can be run from a little USB thumb drive.
       Switch to portable Thunderbird, and many tough problems are solved. Configure Thunderbird to open up both home and office accounts, and carry it with you. Plug in at the office, do your e-mail thing, unplug at the end of the day, go home, plug in and check your home mail account. Your e-mail is now all on the thumb drive, to which you also export and save your address books, and auto-save all future addresses to which you reply. When you want to check home e-mail during the day at the office, use Web-based e-mail. Just leave the important mail on the server and download it to the thumb drive when you get home.
       A quick review of the basics if you’re interested in trying this: Just remember a mail system has two parts, the server and the client. The client has to be configured for the specific mail server. You need four pieces of information: the name of the incoming mail server (usually something like “incoming.verizon.net”) and the outgoing (“out.verizon.net”), your account name and password—and you’re set. AOL, Google and other services have pretty good setup directions for specific clients.