Choosing the Account That s Right for You

Choosing the Account That's Right for You

Now that you know a little about the different protocols Outlook supports and the options for accessing mail, you need to decide what type of account(s) you want to set up and how you want to access those accounts. Your ISP or system administrator might automatically make this decision for you.

Choosing a Mail Protocol

If you can choose the protocol you use to access mail, you'll need to carefully examine the pros and cons of each protocol. First though, you need to determine which access method you want to use: online, offline, or disconnected.

• Offline Outlook retrieves messages from the mail server and downloads them to the local machine.

• Online Messages remain on the mail server and the Outlook client manipulates those messages remotely.

• Disconnected Allows the client to connect to the mail server and make a copy, or cache, of selected messages. The client then disconnects from the server, leaving the messages stored on the server. While offline, you can use the Outlook client to manipulate the messages and then later reconnect to the server and synchronize information.

With both online and disconnected methods, mail is left on the server, which can be important if you need to access your email from multiple machines or when you need to access a mailbox shared with another person. POP3 provides the ability to download your messages from the server and work with them offline. If this is very important to you, consider POP3 as your preferred protocol. If you have multiple mail folders on your server that you need to access, you'll need to use IMAP or Exchange. If you want to access a Hotmail account, you'll need to use HTTP. Contact your system administrator or your ISP help desk if you're not sure what protocols are available to you.

If you want to access your AOL email through Outlook, see "Does AOL Work with Outlook?" in the "Troubleshooting" section at the end of this chapter.

If you need to choose between POP3 and IMAP4, you'll need to compare the pros and cons of each access method. In many ways, the two protocols are similar. Both POP3 and IMAP4

• Provide mail access (receiving) only, relying on SMTP for sending

• Allow mail access from a variety of operating systems and mail clients

• Support online (download and leave on server) and offline (download and delete) access

IMAP is really a superset of the POP3 protocol. It has a number of advantages over POP3:

• Append messages to other folders You can use IMAP to add messages to other folders besides the Inbox. You can move messages received in your Inbox to other folders and have those changes uploaded to the server.

• Message flags With an IMAP connection, you can control the flag status of a message. Possible flags are read, replied to, and deleted.

• Shared folder access Multiple users can connect to a shared IMAP folder at the same time.

• Support for folder hierarchies You can access and manipulate folders and subfolders, and create new folders on the server.

• Multiple download options You have the ability to specify whether just headers, headers and some of the message body, headers and all of the message body, or entire messages are downloaded.

• Server-based manipulation You have the ability to search messages on the server to reduce data transfer.

Another drawback to POP3 access is that no maintenance of message state information is possible. If you download a message on your desktop computer, mark the message as read, and then download the message again on your laptop, the message on your laptop isn't marked as read. IMAP, on the other hand, maintains message state information so that a message read or replied to on one computer will carry the same message status on another computer.

POP3 is often easier to configure, and there are more email clients and providers that support POP3, but if you have a choice, POP3 should be given preference only when mail access will happen on only one machine. For multiple-machine access or access over a slow or cellular connection, IMAP4 is the preferred access method and will likely grow in popularity as the number of handheld devices with wireless Internet access grows.