The simplicity of accessing your POP E-mail

By Lim Tri Santosa

BANDUNG (JP): A new technology has been introduced that has fundamentally transformed human society by changing the way people communicate with each other. Every day the citizens of the Internet send each other billions of e-mail messages. If you are online a lot, you yourself may send a dozen or two e-mails each day without even thinking about it. Obviously e-mail has become an extremely popular communication tool in a very short time!

Have you ever wondered how e-mail gets from your desktop to a friend halfway around the world? What is a POP3 server, and how does it hold your mail? The answers may surprise you, because it turns out that e-mail is an incredibly simple system at its core!

The first e-mail message was sent in 1971 by an engineer named Ray Tomlinson. Prior to this, you could only send messages to users on a single machine. Tomlinson's breakthrough was the ability to send messages to other machines on the Internet, using the @ sign to designate the receiving machine.

An e-mail POP3 (Post Office Protocol 3) account allows a client or user to receive e-mail into a dedicated POP3 e-mail box. Each POP3 is assigned an e-mail logon userID (usually the part before the "@" mark in your e-mail address), and password so that the user may log onto the e-mail server (usually but not always, the word 'pop' and the part after the "@" mark in your e- mail address).

Individual users may operate one or more e-mail POP3's, but it is not recommended that more than one user share a single e-mail POP3 because when one user downloads their mail they would be downloading all the e-mails sent to that POP3, including the e- mail intended for other users.

An e-mail message has always been nothing more than a simple text message, a piece of text sent to a recipient. When you send an e-mail message to a friend, you are sending a piece of text. In the beginning, and even today, e-mail messages tended to be short pieces of text, although the ability to add attachments now makes many e-mail messages quite long.

You have probably already received several e-mail messages today. To look at them you use some sort of e-mail client. Many people use well-known stand-alone clients like Microsoft Outlook, Outlook Express, Eudora or Pegasus. People who subscribe to free e-mail services like HotMail or Yahoo Mail use an e-mail client that appears in a web page.

JBMail

Nearly every e-mail client on the market works the same way: it first downloads all the mail from a mail server, then lets the user manipulate the messages. However, the POP3 protocol used world-wide also supports a different method: e-mails can be directly deleted from servers, or previewed, without first being downloaded. And that is what JBMail (www.pc-tools.net) lets you do.

You can use JBMail to view, preview, delete, save, print, get attachments, delete junk mail or purge your entire mailbox. JBMail is both powerful and easy to use.

The key to JBMail's power is the unusual way it interacts with your Internet mail box. Instead of first downloading all mail to the local computer and then letting you manipulate that mail, JBMail logs into your mail server, stays connected and gives you direct access to your mailbox.

This means that you do not have to wait for large messages and junk mail to load; instead, you have the power to load the messages you want. You can also delete mail such as junk mail, or very large messages directly from your mailbox, completely bypassing the time-consuming download process.

JBMail is also ideal for use on shared computers or public terminals. The program only needs three inputs: your pop e-mail server, your user ID name, and your e-mail password. It doesn't save any of this information, hence even though your JBMail floppy disk is stolen by someone, the thief cannot access your e- mail box. That is the best feature! With a conventional e-mail program you would have to create separate directories for your different mailboxes and spend hours tweaking different profiles, and if someone was able to run it, he would get all of your e- mails.

As an added advantage, you do not have to worry about mailbox "synchronization" because you are directly reading and deleting mail from your server, and not working with a copy of your mail.

The partial access mode lets you specify a maximum number of messages to load. If your mailbox contains more than that many messages, then only the first x messages are loaded. The rest are completely ignored, making it possible to easily access mail in a full mailbox. The 'Poll' button will return the size of mailbox, how many messages it contains and how much space they occupy.

Traveling? Trying to access your mail from another city or abroad? Or from an Internet cafe? JBMail is a "light-weight" e- mail client; it requires no installation and no detailed setup. A single 84Kb exe with no dll's or other components, run from a floppy disk is sufficient to check your mail on someone else's system without installing anything. No files are installed to hard disk, so you can easily use JBMail to access different mailboxes. After you view or preview the e-mail messages, then either save them to your floppy disk (including any attachments) or directly print to the printer, or delete them. I think this is must-have "leaving office without it" software

Mail2web

With the growing popularity of the Internet, and the World Wide Web (WWW) in particular, many of us find ourselves in places that have WWW access. Mail2web.com allows you to use a WWW browser to read your e-mail, reply, forward, delete and send new messages, making your e-mail accessible from anywhere. There is no need to get a different e-mail address or have your mail forwarded. Mail2web.com is a gateway that actually contacts your mail server and converts the content to HTML allowing easy access to your regular e-mail.

Yes, it is the same as JBMail, except Mail2web doesn't directly go to your computer, the message traveled first from the POP server to Mail2web server, then your computer.

Consequently, it may take a while to retrieve the mail information from your POP server especially if there are a lot of e-mails waiting for you, because of the high level of traffic on the Internet. From my previous experience, I think JBMail is faster when retrieving, because it uses direct POP access and has partial access mode.

Through Mail2web, you have the option of composing a new message, forward or reply. When you reply, it will look as if it comes from your usual e-mail account bearing your original e-mail address. All you need is a web-browser, so any cybercafe, terminal or Internet-connected PC will do. The downside is you cannot easily save your incoming e-mails to floppy disk like JBMail does, because it is HTML web format.

By the way, there are a lot of web sites offering access to your original POP e-mail address, please be careful, some of them collect your information to do the spamming. My advice is don't readily trust the service content, but the Mail2web service is trustworthy. If you are accessing from your PDA you can use the PDA-optimized www.mail2pda.com or use your WAP compatible GSM mobile phone to access WAP optimized www.mail2wap.com.

From this description, you can see that today's e-mail system is one of the simplest things ever devised! There truly is nothing to it. There are parts of the system like the routing rules in sendmail that get complicated, but overall the system is as simple as it can possibly be. The next time you're out of the office, you will now have the comfort of sending /receiving e- mails using your original e-mail address. (abbaml@yahoo.com)