So you’ve decided upon an email application to manage your growing email “habit”. You finally get through to tech support at your Internet Service Provider (ISP), and they begin to guide you through the process of configuring your email application to send and receive email. You dutifully enter the information in the spaces provided.

Hopefully, you write the information down on a good old low-tech piece of paper just in case. By the way, another way to record the settings is to “take a picture” of the filled-out Preferences box using your computer’s screen capture capabilities, and save it on your computer for future reference.

Anyway, what do all those settings mean? If you use but one computer, one email address, and one ISP, having a little background knowledge might seem superfluous. However, if you travel, with or without a laptop, or have a couple of different email addresses for separate businesses or other purposes, a little know-how can save you from some “why’d it do THAT?” experiences.

Let’s explore the meaning of some common email application account preference fields. First, there’s the “Name” field. Yup, you guessed it. Your name. Actually, the name you place in this field is used by most email applications in the FROM field of emails you send out. The reader then sees your real name in addition to your email address. This can be very helpful if your email address is radically different from your real name.

Next, your email address. Pretty much self-explanatory.

Now to settings for receiving mail. Your “Account ID” is normally the first half of your email address. “Password” is the password you gave to the ISP when you set up your account. Again, it’s a great ID to record this somewhere. You’ve probably noticed that when you type the password into the Password field the actual letters and/or numbers don’t appear – instead there are dots or asterisks. They won’t help you if you forget your password.

Next is the field for “POP server”. POP is short for “Post Office Protocol”. Most consumer email accounts use POP. Basically, your email is stored in a folder on an email server computer. When you “check your email”, the contents of the folder are downloaded to your email application, and then deleted from the server. For POP servers, the entry is most likely something like “mail.earthlink.net”.

Now for outgoing mail, or sending mail. Your ISP obviously handles sending as well as receiving mail. Most use a protocol called SMTP, short for “Simple Mail Transfer Protocol”. The SMTP server receives outgoing messages from your email application and sends them out across the internet to their destinations. Here’s where it gets a bit tricky.

Some ISPs are quite picky about letting you send email from another account through their SMTP server. Before considering using multiple email addresses, check with your ISP to make sure they allow email from other accounts to flow through their SMTP system. It’s possible you could receive email from multiple accounts with no problem, then find that you’re restricted to sending email only from the account supplied by the ISP. This might defeat your whole multiple email address scheme. My home ISP is very good about using other email accounts, but some broadband internet connections I’ve used while traveling don’t support them at all.

There’s one final preference that deserves discussion. Some email applications allow you to specify an individual email size that will trigger a prompt asking you if you want to spend the time to download it – a great feature if you’re on a slow connection.

© 2004 Peter F. Zimowski