February 17, 2009

 

An E-Mail account should always be maintained. This way you are able to ensure that all messages are clearly placed. A crowded E-Mail account is confusing, unmanageable and slow.

 

 

POP3, IMAP, SMTP and HTTP

 

First we need to know what the individual abbreviations exactly mean, in order to understand how our E-Mail-accounts work:

 

POP3: Post Office Protocol Version 3. POP3 is an ASCII transfer protocol that uses commands by default and sends them to port 110. POP3 requires no persistent connection to the mail server. The connection to the server is built and terminated via the client.

 

IMAP: Internet Message Access Protocol. IMAP is an application log, which allows the access to E-Mails located in a mailbox on the mail server. IMAP also manages received mail. Therefore, IMAP uses port 143.

 

SMTP: Simple Mail Transfer Protocol. SMTP is a protocol of the datagram of Protocol for exchanging E-Mail messages in computer networks. The SMTP server uses the ports 25 and 587 to connect to the mail server.

 

HTTP: Hypertext Transfer Protocol. HTTP is a protocol for transferring data via a network. It is primarily used to load Web sites from the World Wide Web into a Web browser. HTTP uses port 80.

 

 

Differences between POP3, IMAP and HTTP

 

To better understand how your mail account works, we now want to different transfer methods and protocols from each other.

 

The POP3 protocol picks your messages from an E-Mail Server up. You can decide whether to save or delete the messages on the server.

 

Usually the SMTP Protocol is in charge of sending E-mails.
This includes not only the sending of messages from the E mail client of the user to the server of the provider, but also the forwarding of messages from server to server within the Internet or corporate network. Like POP3, SMTP is a text-based protocol.

 

IMAP leaves the files (mails) on the mail server of the provider, until the client deletes them for good. The file must not be saved by the user itself, because the provider is responsible for the backup of the data. You can access your messages from each computer. When you log on by the E mail server, the existing data gets adjusted with those on your computer. While reading, writing and answering messages, a connection to the E-Mail Server must be established.

 

HTTP is a web based E-Mail service. If you have such an E-Mail provider account, you need a Web browser to access your E-Mails and retrieve them.
HTTP is applied in the graphical portion of the Internet, the World Wide Web. Web-based E-Mail providers often offer the possibility to collect E-Mail messages via POP3 or IMAP.

 

 

Settings for the mail format

 

Again and again we receive E-mails where individual words or characters appear incorrectly. Usually special characters, which are used in the specific country, are responsible for these problems. There are some settings for the E-Mail format which fix this quickly.

 

Conduct these settings in Outlook via Tools/Options. Select the tab “mail format”. Here you can set the format of your messages.

 

By using the option “only text” the content of your E-Mails won´t include HTML objects such as, font, font color, Smileys etc. This format can be uses by any E-Mail client. If you want to send an HTML E-mail you can choose this format on the menu of the new E-Mail.

 

 

Delete messages on an IMAP server for good

 

To finally delete E-Mail messages from an IMAP server you only need one command:
Dial the Outlook Inbox menu Edit/Deleted messages permanently.

 

 

Collect Messages from a specific account

 

An E-Mail account is quickly set up by using the Outlook Setup Wizard. If you have created multiple E-Mail accounts in Outlook you can select from which account you want to collect the messages. Therefore choose Tools/Sending and Receiving. All E-Mail accounts are listed here. Select the desired account and download the messages into your Inbox.

 

To query messages of multiple accounts, choose Tools/Sending and Receiving all accounts.

 

 

Send messages with a specific account

 

There are 3 different ways to select an account to send an e-mail message. As soon as a new E-Mail form is opened, these 3 possibilities are available.

 

In Internet mode:

 

1. Select View/Options. Now you are able to select the desired account in the “sent messages over” field.

 

2. Choose an account with the downward arrow located next to the Send button.

 

3. Then choose File/Sending with.

 

 

In workgroup mode:

 

In workgroup mode, the account can´t be selected individually. E-Mail messages are sent with the service at the top of the list.

 

When using the workgroups in Outlook, you are able to configure the settings of sending and receiving of E-Mails for each account. Therefore you choose Tools/sending and define send/receive/delivery settings/receive group. This dialogue can also be activated via the keyboard shortcut CTRL+ALT+S.

 

In the dialog “transmission groups” all existing E-Mail accounts are summarized to one group. Click the Edit button. In the delivery settings you can see an icon for each created account. Select the accounts which should be added to the transmission group and decide if messages should be send or received via this group. To the right of the folder options, you can now specify whether the complete message or only the header of the message should be downloaded.