STRATEGY FOR GETTING EMAIL ON THE ROAD

STRATEGY FOR GETTING EMAIL ON THE ROAD
in conjunction with having OUTLOOK manage your office email inbox.

For the scenario when you use OUTLOOK at your main computer (in your office, for instance), but you want to be able to read your email from home or on the road (i.e., away from your main computer), we recommend the strategy below. Email life is a trade-off and you can't have it both ways:

If you always leave your messages on the server, then they pile up and become unmanageable
If you always download them to your mail reader (Outlook), then you can't read them while on the road or from home.

How email message storage works:

Once your office computer “picks up” (downloads) messages from our servers, the received messages don’t stay on the server but rather are in your office computer’s inbox. If you want to spy on incoming email when you’re at home (or on the road), you need to get the incoming messages to remain on the server while you're out: go into Outlook (or the equivalent) FILE> WORK OFFLINE (or shut down your computer completely). This will instruct Outlook NOT to check for new messages every few minutes, and thus the newly arrived messages are left on the server and you can access via webmail (webmail, mail2web, horde, etc.) from home. Then when you return to work the next day, uncheck WORK OFFLINE and your mail reader program will resume checking for new messages (SEND/RECEIVE) automatically. The messages that had been collecting on the server (those you were spying on from home) will be downloaded into your office computer and deleted from the server—you then read them from your inbox as normal.

So here's the summary of what to do:

Have LEAVE ON SERVER unchecked, thus OUTLOOK ALWAYS captures them from the server and they are no longer on the server.
When you are out of the office AND want to read email on the road or from home, before you leave the office, click on
OUTLOOK> FILE> WORK OFFLINE.
This tells OUTLOOK *not* to read messages at all from the server (and leaves them on the server). Then when you return to the office, unclick the WORK OFFLINE. (and SEND/RECEIVE to start updating at that moment)