09-09-2008 01:00 AM
The usual practice of configuring your email client to retrieve email from your ISP's servers works well, but not for all situations. Suppose you add a laptop as a compliment to your desktop machine, or you'd occasionally like to use your spouse's computer to read your email -- you can run into problems trying to keep all of your email clients in sync. You can use IMAP (Internet Mail Access Protocol) instead of POP3 (Post Office Protocol), but then you need to store all of your email on your ISP's servers indefinitely, which has its own drawbacks. Here's a way you can set up a single machine on your own network to fetch and store your email and serve it to any number of email clients.