Monday
Nov292010
Organizing your email life.
Monday, November 29, 2010 at 4:01PM Smart phones are more popular than ever. We check our email at home, at the office, from our phones, iPads, laptops, etc.. Often people forget which emails they responded to, which device they received an email on. This just makes it a burden instead of what it is support to be...a helpful time saver. We can often send ten emails in the time it takes to make one phone call.
If you use Outlook, web-mail or another email program, chances are you use POP email. POP allows you to download whatever email is sitting out there in your account on the web to the device your checking it on. Normally, if you download mail into your desktop computer, it stays there. Go to your laptop and check you mail there later in the day, and any new mail is brought there, and stays THERE. It gets confusing.
IMAP is the answer. Think of IMAP as your mail staying up on the servers out on the Internet. Your just viewing them from whatever device your currently using. That's not really how it works, but its easier to think of it like that. If you send mail from your cellphone you can go to your mail on your desktop or laptop and when you look in your sent items, its there. If you get 20 new emails on your laptop and only read 10 of then, the rest will still show as unread on any other device you check them on.
The thing is, its no harder to setup than the pop mail your probably using now. Just different settings. And here is an even better way to do it...don't use your currently email account anymore! If you don't have one already, get a GMail account. Its free, has more storage than your current account and has the best spam filtering available today. Often you can even just setup your current account (if you don't want to loose the address) to forward all mail into a free google email account (you can check with your email problem on how to do this, for example, if you have an @verizon.net email address, you can call and ask Verizon how to do this)
Here's what you do:
1) Go to www.gmail.com and setup a free account or if you have one already, log into it.
2) Click on SETTINGS then FORWARDING AND POP and Click on Enable IMAP
3) Click on CONFIGURATION INSTRUCTIONS right below that and you will find instructions on setting up most popular email programs for Windows, Mac and iPhone. If you have an Android phone, you just log in using your Google Mail account and your already up and running on IMAP.
Email should not be a hassle. It should be a way to keep in contact easily from anywhere on any device. Use facebook or twitter or other services a lot? Set them up to send messages to you via email when someone contacts you there so you don't need to log in every time to see if someone is trying to contact you. Want to know how to do that? That's another story. :)
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