By Lou Dolinar
Updated Feb. 14, 2006

If e-mail wasn't so darn useful, we'd never put up with spam, and various well-intentioned corporate polices that get in the way of receiving office e-mail at home, and home e-mail in the office. Want to work from more than one location and keep your mail and address books organized and consistent? Lotsa luck.

But there are ways. After our review of non-Microsoft Mail Clients, I thought we might want to look at some of the more advanced ways in which you can actually use e-mail.

There are two generic tools we'll cover this week. E-mail forwarding, usually a function of your service provider, and accessing multiple mailboxes, a function of your e-mail client, for instance, Outlook Express, Thunderbird,Pegasus, etc.

Forwarding policies vary, so it pays to read the fine print when you're shopping for an e-mail provider. A luxurious account, like one that hosts my dolinar.com domain at Ipowerweb, lets me create up to 50 mailboxes and forward from any one of them to multiple recipients, plus I can keep a copy of the e-mail on Ipowerweb's server. Stingy Verizon limits me to one forwarding address and won't save the forwarded mail. Yahoo won't let me forward e-mail at all with a free account, but I could with a paid

one. Lots of office e-mail requires system administrator approval for forwarding.

A simple forwarding strategy: Let's say I have a Verizon account at home (dolinar@ verizon.net), and my business gives me an account (dolinar@newsday.com) at work. I could empty out the Verizon account and forward it to dolinar@newsday.com, and get personal e-mail in the office. Alternately, I could impose on my information systems department to forward Newsday mail to the Verizon account.

You can do even more interesting things with something like the Ipowerweb account. Let's say you're the secretary of the local volunteer fire department and you want to get mail to officers. Set up an account for chiefs@firedepartment.com, then forward that account to tom, dick and harry @firedepartment.com.

Forwarding is particularly useful when you register your own domain name, such as dolinar.com, and use it as part of a permanent e-mail address. Lots of companies will take care of the registration and throw in mail forwarding for $25 or so a year. The nice thing here is that you own the name, and even if the registrar goes bust, you can move it to a new one. I do something like this with lou@dolinar.com, which forwards to my regular e-mail account, dolinar@verizon.net. Since I also have 50 free e-mail

addresses, I've been donating forwarding accounts to distant relatives, like marko@dolinar.com in Yugoslavia.

Note that when you respond to a forwarded e-mail, your return address is the account the mail was forwarded to. For example, you send an e-mail to Account A, which forwards to Account B. I reply to you from Account B. Account B is the return address.

The other way to get more than one mailbox to a single PC is by using your e-mail program's ability to automatically download from more than one account. (Pretty simple, in most cases: With Outlook Express, go to Tools/Accounts/Add and a wizard will walk you through the process. You need your account name, password and the names of the incoming and outgoing POP servers of your service) In this scenario, I would forget about forwarding and set up my office PC to download e-mail from my office server

(dolinar@newsday.com), my permanent account (lou@dolinar .com) and my provider account (dolinar@verizon.net).

The only fly in the ointment here is that while your e-mail program may let you download office mail at home, your company's information systems department may not; many companies block external networks from accessing these internal files. It never hurts to ask, however, and it may make sense to simply have your internal mail forwarded to an external mail account, which is what I do.

There are a couple of other traps when accessing the same mailbox from more than one computer. By default, a standard e-mail program using POP (post office protocol) deletes your e-mail from the mail server after you've downloaded the e-mail. Now suppose you get 10 e-mails before 9 a.m., and 20 during the day. You download e-mail at home at 9 a.m., and at the office from the same server at 5 p.m. The mail you get before 9 a.m. is then deleted from the server, so you can't get it at the office during

the day. The mail you pick up in the office during the day, meanwhile, isn't available at home. Not an ideal situation.

The trick here is to configure your e-mail program to leave mail on the server, an option that most programs have. You usually are given a time limit on this, for example, permanently, or a certain number of days. If you set the time limit at two days and check your mail every day, your home and office PCs will be perfectly synchronized. If you wait more than two days to check from one of the PCs, however, that system will be out of sync.

There's an even better system for handling the multilocation e-mail problem, a protocol called IMAP, which pretty much keeps everything on the file server and lets you manage the mail there, rather than on the PC. Except for AOL, which just converted, IMAP is relatively rare among Internet service providers, though more private companies are implementing it.

Next week, more stupid e-mail tricks.