Email: everything you wanted to know but didn't know how to ask.

The most common customer service issue we have to deal with is email, and most of those problems would go away if customers had a better understanding of how it works. Internet email is a very complex issue, and the problem is exacerbated by companies like Microsoft trying to turn everything into a point-n-click solution. The fact that an article like this is necessary proves that some knowledge is necessary. POP or IMAP? When you try to collect your email, you do so using one of two methods: POP or IMAP. You probably don't need to know the technical difference, except to understand how it works. POP is the older, more traditional mechanism, involving an email program (or client) on your computer. Web access is not required, only connectivity to the Internet. IMAP is web-mail, like Hotmail or Yahoo, and requires accessing some website with a browser. Web-mail has some advantages: there are no configuration issues, and you can check email from any computer connected to the Internet (airports and hotels) with a minimum of hassle, but there is a downside as well. Depending on your service level and personal usage, you may not be able to receive attachments, or some email may be lost because it triggered a spam filter. What about spam filters? There is no easy answer to this problem. There is no mechanism whereby ALL spam can be stopped and ALL legitimate email allowed through. Why, you ask? Because the spammers (criminals who should receive 40 year prison sentences) do not label their junk as spam. Filters parse the subject lines and body looking for certain words or combinations (URGENT, drugs, VIAGRA, college diplomas, hardcore, etc), as well as variations (like V1agr4). The spammers can always find some variation not programmed into the filter algorhythm. You might get a legitimate email from your pharmacy with the word "prescription" in the subject or body, and it gets dumped. Back to the subject, we need to discuss POP. While it has tricky configuration issues, it is still the most flexible system, and gives you more control. This mechanism requires an email client on your computer, and three configuration variables. Email clients include Eudora, Pegasus, Netscape mail, Outlook, Outlook Express, and others. Outlook Express probably has the biggest market share, since it is bundled with the Windows operating systems. It also has the greatest risk, since it has numerous security holes, and has been the target of uncounted virus attacks. The required configuration variables include username password mailserver address Depending on your mailserver setup, the username may be just the part of your email address before the '@' sign (fred in fred@abc.com), or it may be something like "fred+abc.com", or even "fred@abc.com". Consult your system administrator. Your password, ideally, should be 6-10 characters, letters and numbers, with no spaces. Mailserver. Now we get to the good stuff. What is a mailserver, anyway? Actually, it's just a webserver with two software packages running on it: one to send mail (often named "Sendmail"), and one to collect mail sent to you (often named "popper"). If you have a website (you do have a website, don't you?), this is the same machine that hosts your website. If not, it is one designated by your ISP to handle mail. Since sending and receiving mail are two different functions, you could have two different mailserver addresses. This is not the most common setup, but some ISPs (like SWBell) may require you to use their SMTP (outgoing) server, but allow you to use the POP (incoming) server on your hosting server. This also means that your web developer may give you an address for sending mail, but you can't connect (for the reason above). Finally, you're set up, and can receive email. What happens when you check your mail? Where does it come from, and where does it go? It is sitting on your mailserver/webserver, in one large text file. When you download it, that file is transferred to your computer, and deleted from the mailserver. From that point on, you can read the mail on your local computer, without being connected to the Internet, until you delete it. This is where a major problem lives. Some people, for reasons yet to be understood, set the mail client to NOT delete mail from the server on download. Eventually (sometimes in a few days), that one single file grows to an enormous size, and either shuts down their mail service, or shuts down the mailserver entirely. This tends to make your System Admin testy. Outlook (Express), in particular, has a setting that implies that you can keep store mail on the server until you delete it from your local computer. You should not infer that this actually works, and this is the source of many problems. Email is a wonderful tool, but things can happen. Your best insurance is to take the time to learn how it works, and not expect it to do unreasonable things.