Here’s an real-world analogy for your email:
Imagine you’re sitting in your house – when the mail truck comes by, do you get your mail auto-deposited in your lap? No, you have to go out and get it from the mailbox, right? Then you take your mail back into the house and put it on the counter or desk and go thru it and open the ones you want, delete the ones you don’t want, etc.
Your online email goes thru the same process. When someone sends a message to [email protected], the message is deposited in your ‘mailbox’ on the server. Unless you do something, you’ll never see that message. So how do you ‘walk out to your mailbox’ in this online scenario? This is the purpose of that ‘check mail’ or ‘get/send messages’ button on your email program (outlook, Eudora, apple mail, etc.). When you click that button, your computer does a few tasks:
- Ask you for your username & password to connect to the server – if you checked the ‘save password’ box at some point in the past, then you’ll skip this step. It doesn’t mean you don’t have a password, just that your computer is remembering it for you
Real-world Analogy: Get the key to your mailbox
- Connect to the mail server at yourdomain.com and log in using the above username and password
Walk out to your mailbox at the end of your driveway - Look at your mailbox – is there mail in it? If so, note the # of messages and the date they came in
Open the mailbox - Download each message individually to your mail program, then delete that specific message from the online mailbox and continue with the next message.
Take out an envelope and tuck it under your arm - Once done downloading all the messages, disconnect from the server and display your new mail for you.
Close the mailbox door, walk back inside the house, spread the mail out and start sorting it.
So what happens in this scenario if you have a check put in the box for your desktop mail program to ‘leave mail on server for 7 days’? Well, step 4 then becomes:
4. Download each message individually to your mail program, then delete that specific message unless the message is less than 7 days old, in which case leave a copy of the message on the server.
Take out an envlope, photocopy the contents and put it back in the mailbox, taking the original envelope with you
Why should you do this?
Well, its nice as a back-up – if you were to have problems with your mail program, you could restore from a backup (you have a backup, right?), and be able to re-download all of the mail that came thru in the past week since you made your backup. It also works great if you are in & out of the office and want to be able to check your mail via web-mail that same day or the next day (more on that in another article)
Why should you not do this?
The big reason is that the messages in your online inbox are taking up space on the server that count against your quota. Each mail account has its own quota of so many MegaBytes (MB) of data – once you reach that quota, your (online) mailbox is Full and any further email you get will be bounced back to the sender.
Again, going back to our analogy – if you keep those photocopies of your mail in your mailbox, eventually there will be so many photocopies sitting in there that the mailperson will be unable to stuff any more mail in your box. Even if you take the original envelopes that you bring int your house and throw them all away, that won’t do anything to the copies of the mail you left in your mailbox unless you go out and throw those away too.
If you check email once a day or even every few days, you’ll never end up with a full mailbox, since the occasion where you receive 40 MB of email (as an example) in a single day is very rare. BUT if you leave your mail on the server, then even if you check mail every 10 minutes, that mail is still sitting in your mailbox for 7 days (using our example above).
Therefore, our recommendation is NOT to use the ‘leave mail on server’ option in your mail program checked unless you have a very good reason, and if so, be aware that if you get lots of those ‘oh so funny’ movie files from your friends, even if you delete them all in your mail progrm, they’ll still be taking up lots of space in your online mailbox and you run the risk of bouncing email.
If you have further questions, feel free to contact [email protected] and we’ll be happy to walk you through your specific situation.